architecture accessibility

Accessibility

What has been checked and fixed so far, how to run the check again, and what is still for a person to judge. The first pass (#227) covers the custom components and the main screens on iPhone. It was done before the first TestFlight build.

What was already sound

• Text scales. Every ThreadsKit type role uses a Dynamic Type text style and ScaledMetric, up to the largest accessibility size. The one exception is on purpose: the label role (the small uppercase mono text) stops at .xxLarge (Design handoff §3).
• Reduce Motion is honoured by ThreadsKit's threadsAnimation.
• Custom components speak. The capacity slider is a three-step adjustable slider for VoiceOver ("Capacity for today"); the load meter reads its value and state; each heatmap cell reads "Day 5, done" with a hint; decorative bars (window bar, sparkline, day-shape bar, check circle, companion mark) are hidden, with the same information in text beside them; selected chips and segments carry the selected trait. State is never colour alone: load has its word, habits and Anchors have text.

Found and fixed in #227

Apple's automated audit (performAccessibilityAudit) plus looking at the screens at the Accessibility Extra Large text size found layouts that broke when text grew:

• Habits group header split a word ("Mornin / g") beside a squeezed count. Now the title and count stack at accessibility sizes (AdaptiveRow). The same row is used for the Anchors group on Today and the load meter.
• Button pairs ("Look at it" · "Not now", "Plan tomorrow" · "Not today", "Pick for today" · "Not now", "Set it" · "Not now") stack at accessibility sizes (AdaptiveButtons) instead of squeezing.
• The companion mark sits above its line, not beside it, at accessibility sizes (CompanionRow): a long word ("tomorrow.") beside the mark needed more width than was left and widened the whole Today column past its margins.
• Today's column is pinned to the visible width on a phone, so one long unbreakable word in a title wraps inside the margins instead of moving them. Not beside a detail panel (iPad, Mac): there containerRelativeFrame measures the whole window, not the list column, and the content was laid out at window width, centred, and clipped by its pane (found on a real iPad, #241; a UI test now checks the load meter stays inside the 440 pt column).
• The Habits | Anchors pill had a fixed height of 38 pt while its text scales; it now grows with the text.

The audit, and what it is not

AccessibilityAuditUITests runs the audit on Today, Habits, Anchors, Wellbeing, Settings and two Night Planning steps at the default size, and on Today, Habits, Settings and the Night Planning Load step at Accessibility Extra Large. Run it with xcodebuild test … -only-testing:JamaalUITests/AccessibilityAuditUITests on an iPhone simulator. It finds mechanical problems (contrast, clipped or fixed-size text, missing descriptions, small hit areas). It cannot judge whether VoiceOver reads a screen well.

Two kinds of finding are accepted, and the test skips them:

1. "Dynamic Type font sizes are partially unsupported" on the small uppercase labels (the date, the load word, "ANCHORS", "0/2", step counts). This is the label cap above. Owner decision: raise the cap in ThreadsKit (for example to .accessibility2) so those labels keep growing, at some cost to layouts that hold them. Several labels carry meaning (the load word, a count), so I'd lean to raising it; it is a ThreadsKit release, not an app change.
2. Contrast in the strip just above the floating tab bar. iOS 26 fades scrolling content into the bar, and the audit reads the fade as low contrast. The same text measures 7.7:1 away from the fade, and the palette's text pairs are 5.0:1 or better in light mode (ink3 on app 5.0, ink2 7.9, ink 10.8). Small text should use ink2 or ink; ink3 is the weakest and passes by a small margin. The capacity slider's unselected labels use ink3 (a note for Design).

Still to do (needs a person or a later pass)

• Listen with VoiceOver on a real iPhone: Today (rows, Anchor group, the meter and slider), Night Planning (the rail and the Load step), the focus timer, and a habit's log buttons. Check the reading order, the labels and what each action says. Turn it on with Settings → Accessibility → VoiceOver (triple-click the side button once set up under Accessibility Shortcut).
• Larger sizes (Accessibility XXL and XXXL) and the iPad and Mac layouts at large sizes were not covered.
• Right-to-left and Arabic-Indic numerals (a roadmap item, not started).
• Mac: VoiceOver and keyboard focus order on the sidebar and panel.
• Voice Control and Switch Control: the heatmap cells and the slider should be reachable by name; not tested.
• Increase Contrast and Differentiate Without Colour settings were not tried.