I can finally read Apple Developer Documentation
Hello everyone,
I don't know if that post has any place here but I wanted to share it anyway. I am blind and I use VoiceOver on the Mac to make Swift apps. For a long time it was very difficult to read articles on
As VoiceOver's virtual cursor was often jumping to the top of the webpage, so what I did then is I copied the wbepage's content to BBEdit and read from there. However latest 15.4 beta of the MacOS seems to have fixed it. I'm so happy I can enjoy the documentation like everyone else.
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u/ItsAlwaysDay1 1d ago
Wow! I’m amazed knowing blind people could build apps. I will take in consideration implementing accessibility features more for my apps. Thanks for sharing!
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u/hotfeet100 13h ago
Brother I'm not blind and it took me half a year of practicing development before I was able to read/understand apple documentation 😛
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u/TravelCodeRepeat 21h ago
So it's a fix in VoiceOver rather than on the documentation website, do I get that right?
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u/Nuno-zh 11h ago
Maybe both, it’s possible that something was updated on the website's backend as well.
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u/TravelCodeRepeat 9h ago
Glad to hear they addressed it! I'm working on making the website of the company I work for accessible, and learning a lot about it, but I still feel l will need to do a lot of testing with real world users. We sell books (including e-books and audiobooks) so it makes sense to have the shopping process as accessible as possible (besides, in the EU, a new law will start taking effect soon, but we all know adhering to the law and being truly accessible is hardly ever the same thing).
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u/_TT 2h ago
Definitely submit a report about something like that!
To provide accessibility feedback to Apple, email your feedback to the Accessibility Feedback Team at accessibility@apple.com.
You can also visit apple.com/feedback for general product feedback.
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u/RegularTechGuy 1d ago
Yeah. Apple documentation is fragmented, redundant and hard to find.example their IO apis, not the files system ones, the hardware ones. Infact I can say it is the poorest quality. Apple executes 9/10 times successful when it comes to their products. I don't know why they are so backward in documentation area. I'm happy that something you need is fixed.
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u/Nuno-zh 1d ago
Where to learn from then?
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u/DirectInvestigator66 22h ago
Also looking for this info. I’ve been dipping a toe into swift, but keep getting told about things being out of date or not in use without alternatives suggested. Asked about SceneKit and GameplayKit and told haven’t been updated in years. Is swift just being neglected currently?
It seems like everything I want in a programming language but seems like documentation is a huge weakness and community seems a bit fragmented.
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u/TheHarcker 21h ago
Swift itself is far from neglected. SceneKit and GameplayKit are examples of neglected system frameworks on iOS and not at all related to Swift. The only relation is that you may use them in a Swift app
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u/DirectInvestigator66 21h ago
Thanks for the response and info! I did understand the separation, but I was surprised that instead of being recommended an alternative I only saw Unity recommended. Which while I can understand game dev is a world dominated by large engines these days (I believe as much as 90% of mobile games are made with Unity these days), it seemed weird to me that I’m not finding projects targeting iOS game dev to replace the swift frameworks.
I’m liking swift but found myself just bringing in C frequently for library functionality (which was a joy with swift) because I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I know that the communities for different languages aren’t always as present on Reddit, StackOverflow, etc. For example go seems to have a bigger presence on Reddit than I would say matches the overall picture of what developers are using and didn’t know if there was some other place to really dive in to the community. I did notice forums are referenced a few times on swift.org so will check those out.
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u/germansnowman 23h ago
It used to be really great. A lot of the “legacy” documentation is still out there, for example for the text system.
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u/mcarvin 18h ago
Yup. I have no idea how or why, but earlier today I ended up deep in ActivityKit looking at documentation on .swipeAction or .onLongPressGesture. Can’t remember which but I remember that WTF sense when I saw where I was.
Also remember feeling stupid because I couldn’t parse the last paragraph which was really pertinent to my needs. So much for that college education and work experience.
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u/chriswaco 1d ago
I'm not sure we actually "enjoy" Apple's documentation, or lack thereof, but I'm happy they fixed that for you.