Semantics

Make your Rive views accessible to VoiceOver by enabling semantics in the Apple runtime.

Semantics is currently only available in Early Access. Runtime support is in development or released as experimental.

Have feedback? Join the Early Access community to share your thoughts and help shape the feature.

This page covers enabling semantics in the New Runtime so your Rive views are accessible to VoiceOver. To learn what semantics are and how to add them to a graphic, see the Semantics editor documentation.

Overview

In the Rive Editor, you can add semantic meaning to certain elements of your graphic-roles such as button, checkbox, tab, image, list, dialog, and more. Alongside these roles, you can add associated labels, values, states, and actions. These settings vary per role.

At runtime, the New Runtime reads those semantics from the running state machine and exposes them to VoiceOver as the view’s accessibilityElements, keeping them up to date as the state machine advances.

Semantics are opt‑in. The default mode is .off, so no accessibility elements are created until you enable semantics on the view.

Semantics must be defined in the editor to have any effect. If an element has no semantics, it is not exposed to screen readers, regardless of the mode you set. See Feature Support for which runtimes currently support semantics.

Availability

Semantics are available in the New Runtime only (not the Legacy Runtime), on every Apple platform the runtime supports except macOS (AppKit):

Platform	Supported
iOS / iPadOS	✅
tvOS	✅
visionOS	✅
Mac Catalyst	✅
macOS (AppKit)	❌

Semantics modes

Semantics are controlled by the Semantics enum, which sets the VoiceOver integration mode for a Rive view:

Mode	Description
.off	Default. Accessibility semantics are disabled. No accessibility elements are created, regardless of VoiceOver state.
.on	Accessibility semantics are always active. Elements are created and kept up‑to‑date on every frame.
.automatic	Accessibility semantics activate and deactivate automatically based on whether VoiceOver is currently running.

For most apps, prefer .automatic — it keeps the accessibility tree in sync only while VoiceOver is active, avoiding unnecessary work when it isn’t.

Usage

Set the semantics mode on the view (UIKit) or with the .semantics(_:) modifier (SwiftUI).

UIKit

let rive = try await Rive(...)
let riveView = RiveUIView(rive: rive)
// Enable semantics only while VoiceOver is running
riveView.semantics = .automatic
// Always keep semantics active
riveView.semantics = .on
// Disable semantics (default)
riveView.semantics = .off