Announcing New Course: Adapting to User Accessibility Settings in SwiftUI!

Announcing New Pro Course: Adapting to User Accessibility Settings in SwiftUI!

If you've spent any time at all bringing the benefits of accessibility to your iOS projects, you know it can take a long time to test the impact of the accessibility settings on your app — and development time is tight as it is!

Learn how to accelerate your accessibility development and testing with Xcode tooling and the power of SwiftUI in our new Adapting to User Accessibility Settings in SwiftUI course!

Keep reading to hear more about it from course instructor Harlan Kellaway:

Why should I take your course on accessibility in SwiftUI?

"This course covers a whole lot about accessibility settings in a small surface area! It covers two very common settings that every professional iOS developer should be familiar with: Dark Mode and Dynamic Type, and it shows you how to be responsive to accessibility settings in a way where you can easily bring this knowledge to your own projects.

While this focuses on reacting to settings with visual effects, you'll also learn other valuable things: how to use the powerful tooling bundled with Xcode (Accessibility Inspector, Debug Preview, and Environment Overrides) as well as the virtue of short development cycles. You'll come away knowing how to leverage SwiftUI better and how to be a more proficient developer!"

How can this course help with a common pain point when building accessible iOS apps?

"In every iOS job I've had, the question of accessibility implementation has come up. It's usually paired with questions (unfortunately) of how much more time feature work will take if it includes accessibility. What's great is that this course teaches you how to quickly check your accessibility settings implementation right in Xcode using the power of SwiftUI; shorter development cycles will make it easier to get good coverage during regular development.

Something I learned through making this course is that the OS itself keeps values in the SwiftUI Environment. This helped me deepen my understanding of the SwiftUI framework."

Can you please share a cool tip about working with accessibility settings with us?

"It takes just a little code to start responding to user interaction with real accessibility settings on a device:

The above snippet shows a View listening for Settings changes at the OS level (i.e. changes outside of your app). The cool thing is that the OS will update the SwiftUI Environment accordingly; all you have to do is declaratively describe your Views based on those Settings values. This way, your app will automatically stay in sync with device settings. This approach is a great way to respond to settings like Dynamic Type (as you'll learn!)."

Is there anything else we should know about your course?

"Becoming proficient with SwiftUI tooling is an invaluable skill! Take every opportunity to become more fluent; a course like this gives you tooling insight you can apply to more than just accessibility.

Also, you should revisit development categories you thought would slow you down (e.g. Accessibility) and see what SwiftUI has to offer.

Another point this course makes is that accessibility is about making apps usable for all. The easier it becomes to test your accessibility implementation, the less relevant is the notion that accessibility is too much to invest in. The best way to ensure your app is accessible is to incorporate it progressively, and SwiftUI is a great framework for building accessible apps as it keeps accessibility testing right at hand."

Hey — the new Ultimate Subscription gets you access to both videos and books, all in the same subscription. Interested? Click here to learn more ➜

Harlan's Adapting to User Accessibility Settings in SwiftUI course is available for Pro subscribers now!

— Ray