Three notes to all this a11y stuff from my investigation:

1. I tried to write this up clearly, but there are likely some parts that are closer to "Matt shorthand" than "easily understandable by others". Let me know if I should expand on or clarify any of these.
2. In many cases I've included suggested fixes. Please feel free to overrule that with different/improved text.
3. I've tried to do a first pass on triaging these by importance. 1 is "must do", 2 is "should do", 3 is "nice to have". Feel free to edit my comment (if Phab allows it) to reprioritize any of these. This was just my first shot at priority.

Maps are just hard. How should we handle maps for sightless users? I looked at how Google Maps and Apple Maps handle VoiceOver.

• Stock Apple Maps reads out street-by-street. So you can VoiceOver everything, but it's hard to figure out where you're at.
• Google Maps takes an interesting path, and one that maybe we should implement in the future - it basically ignores the map in VoiceOver - and is really a location-based search app, not a mapping app. It will never read the map in VoiceOver (it skips over that entirely), but handles all sort of location searching. If you search for “Goodwill”, it gives the full list of locations as default - the same as if you searched w/o VoiceOver and pulled the results list drawer handle up so it covers the map portion of the screen. And if you select a location, it defaults to the “no map, full screen of the location’s details”.

Places tab (a11y suggestions):

• 2. Header is read as “Places”, and there really isn’t a time that we explicitly let folks know this is a map. Read the header as “Places: Place-based articles pinned on map” or something like that? Though if we implement the “future possibility” (final bullet in this section), that’s irrelevant.
• 2. After the header, VoiceOver goes to the box of articles. This isn’t very helpful when you’re on the default zoomed-out map. Should it first move to the “bring map to me” compass point? (Or maybe just do that if we don’t have location permissions, and are defaulting to where we zoom? That’s probably over engineering this, but would be nice.)
• 1. Could the box on the left (with articles) have a (hidden, used in VoiceOver only) title - something like “Articles with pins on current map”. Right now if swiping through this screen, it’s not quite clear what these articles are - and they are the first thing that are scrolled to after the headers.
• 3. A potential way for us to handle this in the app - which almost certainly would be done as part of future work, if we wanted to use it - is something similar to how Google Maps handles it - just focus on location-based search. If VoiceOver is on, add another search box for location, so it is easy to get to the map center to any spot. VoiceOver ignores the map itself (except for things like the “bring map to me” compass point) - but with the two search boxes, you can get a list of articles near any point you’d like.