iOS chat streaming is effectively silent to VoiceOver #317

Summary

The iOS streaming state has no meaningful VoiceOver output. While waiting for the assistant, the UI presents three animated Circle shapes and a blank assistant message, without an accessibility label or announcement. Reasoning/text mutations are also not exposed as a live-region update.

A VoiceOver user can send a message and receive no indication that work started, is still in progress, completed, or failed until manually navigating the transcript.

Root cause

TypingIndicator (apps/ios/Graff/Sources/ChatView.swift:251-268) is purely visual and has no combined accessibility element, label, value, or live-region behavior. MessageBubble renders it whenever assistant text is empty. Streaming state changes and appended content do not trigger an explicit accessible status announcement.

Expected behavior

• Expose one stable accessibility element such as “Assistant is responding.”
• Avoid exposing the individual decorative dots.
• Announce terminal completion/error without repeatedly speaking every token.
• Make the composer’s disabled/streaming state and stop action understandable.
• Add an accessibility regression test/snapshot for idle, streaming, completed, and failed states.

Related

#59 tracks adding a real stop/interrupt action. This issue covers the missing assistive-technology status semantics.