Accessibility

01The short version

Seven of Apple's nine accessibility features are supported, and each has been checked on a real iPhone with the setting switched on — not assumed from the code that implements it. The two that are missing are the two an app with no video and no audio cannot have.

02VoiceOver

Every button, field and slider in the app carries a name. The ones worth calling out are the sliders, because they are the app's fiddliest controls: each says which end of the range you are holding — “Weekdays, From” — and reads the value the way the screen shows it, so you hear 07:00 rather than 7. BoatScore's four-handle sliders name the field and the bound together: “Tide height, good minimum”.

A tide location's data quality is drawn as one, two or three ticks. Those ticks are spoken too, so you hear “BODC, excellent” rather than just the name of the dataset.

Opening a sheet moves focus into it and closing one gives focus back, so you are never left standing behind a panel that has already opened.

03Voice Control

No control in the app has a spoken name that differs from its printed one. That is the thing Voice Control needs: “tap Preferences” finds the button named Preferences. Buttons drawn as an icon alone carry a name that matches what they do, so they can be spoken to as well as tapped.

04Larger Text

The app follows Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Larger Text, up to 200% — including the largest accessibility sizes, which it takes as far as the layout can honestly hold.

One honest limit: the two dense visualizations — the forecast charts and the score calendar — keep their own text size. Their labels are positioned against a fixed grid, and growing the text inside it makes labels overlap rather than easier to read. Everything else on the screen grows, and every number in those charts is available as text elsewhere in the app.

05Light, dark or system

Appearance is in the app's own preferences: Light, Dark, or System to follow the phone. A dark choice holds regardless of what the phone is set to, and the dark palette covers every screen — the preference sheets, the notification previews and the first-run walkthrough, not only the main screen.

06Reduce Motion

With Reduce Motion on, the app does not merely slow its animation down — it stops it:

• the launch screen shows its finished frame instead of drawing itself;
• switches change state without the knob sliding across;
• loading indicators hold still rather than spin;
• the widget gallery stops scrolling itself and waits for you.

Nothing is lost by any of it. A loading indicator that has stopped still sits beside the word “Loading”, which is what actually tells you what is happening.

07Increase Contrast

With Increase Contrast on, panel borders and dividers strengthen, the palest chart lines darken, and the data-quality chips thin their own fill so the text sitting on them stands clear of it.

Without it, every piece of text in the app already meets the WCAG AA contrast minimum of 4.5:1 against the surface behind it. That is checked automatically whenever the app is built, so a color can't quietly drift below it.

08Color is never the only signal

The chart colors are the Okabe-Ito palette, chosen because its hues stay distinguishable for the common forms of color blindness. But a palette is not enough on its own, so nothing in the app depends on hue alone:

• a tide location's data quality is counted, not colored — one, two or three ticks, which survive grayscale, a dim screen and a screenshot;
• wind direction is an arrow that points;
• every chart series is labeled in words, and its high and low are marked with the figure and the time.

09What the app doesn't have

Two of Apple's features don't apply here. There is no video and no audio anywhere in Tides & Weather, so there is nothing for captions or audio descriptions to describe.

And two things we would rather say than have you discover: the two dense charts don't scale their text with Larger Text, as above; and while VoiceOver's braille output should behave as it does in any properly labeled app, we have not tested it on a braille display ourselves.

10Tell us what's missing