VoiceOver finds a blank line on both sides of a UITextView

Question

I have a table view in which cells contain only UITextView, configured as such:

UITableViewCell *cell = [[UITableViewCell alloc] initWithStyle:UITableViewCellStyleDefault reuseIdentifier:nil]; // Declare and set text & frame ... UITextView *textView = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame:frame]; textView.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor]; textView.editable = NO; textView.font = font; textView.scrollEnabled = NO; textView.text = text; [cell.contentView addSubview:textView]; 

When I test the VoiceOver application, I can find two places that are just small empty elements for which VoiceOver says “empty line” on the left and right edges of the text in the text view. If I have a multi-line string, for example. @"multiple\nlines" , then on the right edge of the first line there is an "empty line", and the other on the left edge of the second line. I cannot find the "empty line" to the left of the first line or to the right of the second line, but as far as I know, they are simply difficult to find.

Why does VoiceOver find these blank lines? How can I get rid of them?

Answer 1

Here is a workaround for this error we encountered today.

Subclass of UITextView and Overriding:

 - (BOOL)isAccessibilityElement { return NO; } 

Returning NO cancels VoiceOver. Then make a container by adding a text view to it and set a custom accessibilityLabel label in the container view:

 containerView.accessibilityLabel = textview.text 

This obviously will not work for some cases (I didn’t study editing very much), but at least it gets to the place where the text view does not display the behavior in question.