Accessibility

Wordhoard is an app for reading, so being readable is not a feature of it — it is the whole job. This page says what that means in practice, and where it stops. support@getwordhoard.com reaches a person.

Text size

Every word in the app is set through one place, and that place scales with the iOS Larger Text setting — including the accessibility sizes at the top of the slider, not just the ordinary ones.

There is also a Text size setting inside Wordhoard, at You → Accessibility, with four steps that multiply what your phone already asks for, up to half again as large. It is there for the reader whose phone is already at its largest and still wants more, which the system slider cannot give you.

Pictures grow with the words. A book cover next to a title set at two and a half times its usual size stops looking like a cover and starts looking like a stamp, so jackets scale too — more slowly than the type, so a shelf is still a shelf.

Rows that hold a label and a value side by side stack them vertically when both no longer fit, rather than letting the value truncate. Nothing in this app is allowed to become unreadable at a size somebody chose on purpose.

Bold text

Wordhoard sets its words in Newsreader and Archivo rather than the system font, and a custom typeface gets nothing from iOS's Bold Text setting unless somebody ships the heavy cuts and wires them up. Four of them are in the app for exactly this reason.

There is a Bold text switch in the app as well. Off means "whatever your phone says". On makes this one app heavier without making your banking app heavier too.

Contrast and colour

The design uses soft, layered panes, and softness is where contrast usually goes wrong. So every colour of text in the app — including the quiet grey used for subtitles and captions — is measured against every background it can be drawn on, and required to clear 4.5:1, the ratio the WCAG guidelines set for body text. The accent colour, the filled button and the button's label are all held to the same bar. This is enforced by a test that fails the build, not by eye.

A High contrast switch trades the glass and translucency for plain, separated surfaces. It comes on by itself if your phone has Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency turned on.

No fact in the app is told by colour alone. Books carry a colour, and the coloured dot never appears without the book's name beside it. Right and wrong answers in a review are never only green and red — they are also words, and a different shape.

Light and dark are one design under two lighting conditions rather than two designs, and there is a checked high-contrast palette for each.

Motion

Turn on Reduce Motion — on your phone, or at You → Accessibility in the app — and anything that travels across the screen stops travelling. The card that flies off the edge when you answer a review simply gives way to the next one. The ring of actions under a long press appears instead of springing open. Screens that slid cross-fade.

Fades and colour changes are deliberately left alone. Reduce Motion asks for things to stop moving across the screen, not for a duller app, and suppressing a cross-fade makes an interface feel broken rather than calm.

Dragging is left alone too. A flashcard follows your finger because the movement is yours — it starts and stops when you do — and taking that away would leave an unswipeable card on the one screen whose entire gesture is a swipe.

VoiceOver and Switch Control

Every control is labelled, every value is spoken, and the whole app has been walked through with VoiceOver running.

Two things needed more than labelling, and both are done:

• Gestures have a spoken equivalent. Some actions in Wordhoard live under a press-and-drag rather than on a button — you hold a card, and a row of actions comes up to slide onto. That gesture cannot be made under VoiceOver, which owns the touch, or under Switch Control, where there is no finger on the glass. So every one of those actions is also an accessibility action, reachable from the rotor as a plain list of names. Swiping through a word's meanings is likewise available as an adjustable value.
• Nothing advances on its own. Two screens used to move on after a couple of seconds. That is fine for somebody who read them in a glance and destructive for somebody listening — the screen is replaced mid-sentence, and the sentence cannot be recovered. When VoiceOver or Switch Control is running, those screens wait to be told to continue instead.

Turning a flashcard over moves VoiceOver focus to the meaning, because the thing that was focused — "Tap to reveal" — no longer exists once it has worked.

Hearing a word

Every word has a speaker button. Where the dictionary has a real pronunciation recording, you hear that; where it does not, the system voice reads the word instead, so the button always speaks. The phonetic spelling is written beside the word either way.

Working offline, and without an account

The main dictionary is inside the app: 127,311 words, answering instantly, with no internet and no account. This matters more than it sounds for accessibility — an app that needs a good connection to define a word is an app that stops working on a train, and slow, failing lookups are hardest on the people for whom every lookup already costs the most effort.

What Wordhoard does not do

Listed because a page of successes is not worth reading:

• No captions or audio descriptions. There is no video in the app, and no spoken content beyond pronunciation, which is written out phonetically beside every word.
• The built-in dictionary has no pronunciation recordings. WordNet is text only. The speaker button falls back to the system voice, which is a synthetic voice rather than a human one.
• The app's own Reduce Motion switch does not reach the first-run walkthrough. Your phone's Reduce Motion setting does. The walkthrough runs before anyone could have opened the app's settings, so in practice this cannot bite — but it is true, so it is here.
• Handwriting and drawing are not supported anywhere, so there is nothing to make accessible; every input in the app is typed, tapped or spoken.

Something here is wrong

If a screen does not work the way this page says it does, that is a bug and we want to know — support@getwordhoard.com. Telling us which screen and what your phone was set to is enough; nothing technical is needed.

Accessibility reports are not a low-priority queue here. They are the ones that get fixed first, because they are the reports where the app is not merely annoying but unusable.