Category Archives: watchOS

Accessible Resistance

Accessibility in software refers to the noble ambition of ensuring that software is usable by as diverse a user base as possible. To that end, software is made more accessible by adapting to a variety of physical or cognitive impairments that may affect any individual user.

In the United States and other countries, there is an ugly trend towards supporting politicians who don’t believe that people from diverse backgrounds, or with specific impairments, should be accommodated by society as a whole.

Many developers are looking for concrete ways to fight these politicians who don’t value diversity and inclusion. One small thing we can all do to push back, to resist, is to ensure our own apps are as accessible as possible.

During my many years as an indie Mac developer, I have often prioritized accessibility in my apps. I have heard from many MarsEdit users, particularly those with vision difficulties, who tell me its accessibility makes it a better alternative to many other blogging solutions.

I am gratified to hear about the ways I have gotten accessibility right, but I am still not satisfied that I have done enough. There are nuances of MarsEdit’s accessibility that can yet be improved, while some of my other apps, such as Black Ink, are still hardly accessible at all.

If you are a Mac or iOS developer who is committed to improving the accessibility of your app, a great place to start is with the WWDC 2016 What’s New In Accessibility session. Apple is always enhancing the variety of accessible features that are built in to iOS, macOS, tvOS, and yes!, even watchOS.

Spend a half hour watching this video, and start getting up to speed with how you will enhance the accessibility of your app. No matter where you live in the world, you can be a strident voice for inclusion by declaring, through your actions in Xcode, that your software is designed to be used by everyone.

Named Watch Faces

It’s starting to look as though it will be common with watchOS 3 to configure multiple watch faces for different life contexts. It will now be easier than ever to swipe between watch faces, and multiple faces of the same base kind can even be configured with different complications suitable to a particular context.

To drive this home and aid in reminding users the intention for each face, it would be useful to apply our own names to them:

“Exercise”
“Work”
“Weekend”
“School”
“Relaxing”
“Childcare”

Best yet, giving names to the configured watch faces provides Siri with a handle for affording seamless integration, such that you could easily switch between the named faces with phrases like:

“Hey Siri, put on your Game face.”

Anything I expect to do frequently on my Watch, I will value being able to do hands-free with Siri. In order to achieve that, everything I would like to switch to, activate, or deactivate, needs to have a name. I wrote previously about this in Labeled Siri Alarms, so I guess my head is in a place where I’m looking for every opportunity to enlist Siri’s help. This is one area where I think I would use such help many times per day.

(Radar #26883175)