Prevent VoiceOver From Reading UIButton as "Possible Text" - swift

Question

I am writing a very simple game that is designed specifically for blind users, but may also be used by sighted users. It uses many buttons as elements, however, blind users interact with these buttons through custom gestures (pan, tap, etc), so standard voiceover interaction is not appropriate.
The issue lies in the fact that there are no accessibility objects on the screen at all, so whenever the game loads, voiceover starts reading the labels on buttons (e.g. "Possible text: back, menu...). These buttons are read regardless of the fact that they are not enabled. I also can't remove most of them from the view for blind users.
I have tried turning off accessibility for the elements, unchecking "button" from accessibility traits, everything has allows direct interaction selected, I have tried .accessibilityElementsHidden, all the suggestions from How do you exclude a UIButton from VoiceOver? and nothing seems to work.
My current solution has a clear UILabel with no text in it, this is set to the only item in the .accessibilityElements array, and then for good measure I post an accessibility screen changed notification with that label as the object so it becomes focused, then I wait a second in a dispatch queue async after call, remove the label entirely, and set focus back to the main view so the user can interact.
Here is an example of my current solution:
override func viewWillAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
super.viewWillAppear(animated)
self.accessibilityElements = [lblVoiceOver!]
}
override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
super.viewDidAppear(animated)
UIAccessibility.post(notification: .screenChanged, argument: lblVoiceOver)
DispatchQueue.main.asyncAfter(deadline: .now() + 1.0) {
self.lblVoiceOver.removeFromSuperview()
UIAccessibility.post(notification: .screenChanged, argument: self.view)
}
}
This is a silly hack, at best, and I would love to implement a real solution that simply prevents the "Possible text" from being read by voiceover. I believe the possible text feature was added in iOS 11, to help apps that are not written with accessibility in mind to be more accessibility friendly, but so far I haven't found a way to turn this off.

Answer 1

The issue lies in the fact that there are no accessibility objects on the screen at all.
If you want to reach this purpose, just write self.view.accessibilityElementsHidden = true in your view controller that will contain no accessible element for VoiceOver anymore: this will indicate that the content of your container isn't accessible.
blind users interact with these buttons through custom gestures (pan, tap, etc), so standard voiceover interaction is not appropriate [...] I would love to implement a real solution that simply prevents the "Possible text" from being read by voiceover.
... following the preceding rationale, you should prevent VoiceOver from analyzing and reading anything in your view.
Now, dealing just with your buttons, I created a blank project with a simple code for the view controller hereafter (Swift 5.0, iOS 12):
import UIKit
class NonAccessibleButtonVC: UIViewController {
#IBOutlet weak var aboveLabel: UILabel!
#IBOutlet weak var belowLabel: UILabel!
#IBOutlet weak var myButton: UIButton!
override func viewDidAppear(_ animated: Bool) {
super.viewDidAppear(animated)
myButton.accessibilityElementsHidden = true
}
}
... and you get the following result on your device:
The button isn't taken into account as an accessible element and if it doesn't work in your code, it means that anything else prevents this correct operation. Add maybe the setAccessibleElement button property value to false according to your context ?
However, another solution could be defining the display of the desired accessibility objects in your view thanks to its accessibilityElements property taking away the buttons for instance (see Example 2 of this link): that will definitely work in addition to ordering all your elements.