1. Why an advent calendar needed this
Days to Christmas is made by Phil Strain at Accessible Resources Ltd. His PhD in human-computer interaction was on conveying spatial information through audio and haptics to blind web users. He has led accessibility at Google, Apple, Spotify and now Miro.
That research is why this app counts the way it does. A countdown is a number, and a number is the least accessible way to tell a child that Christmas is close. So the app also says it out loud, and taps it out in your hand, one tap per sleep.
The Advent calendar came from the same place. Most advent calendars are a picture and a chocolate. This one is 24 activities organised by sense, following Sense’s guidance on making a sensory advent calendar, written for autistic and sensory-seeking children and free for everyone. The doors are not a paid tier and never will be.
2. What is supported
These are Apple’s own Accessibility Nutrition Label categories, and the same answers are declared on the App Store product page. Where something does not apply, the reason is given rather than left blank.
| Feature | Supported | What that means here |
|---|---|---|
| VoiceOver | Yes | Every control is labelled, every Advent door announces its number, title, sense and state, and decorative artwork is hidden from the rotor. Toasts and confirmations are announced rather than left on screen to be found. When VoiceOver is running, the app’s own read-aloud posts an announcement instead of speaking over it. |
| Voice Control | Yes | Controls carry visible or labelled names, so “tap Open today’s door” works. Locked doors deliberately drop their button role, so Voice Control and Switch Control do not offer you a target that cannot be opened. |
| Larger Text | Yes | Text scales with the system setting throughout. At accessibility text sizes the Advent grid reflows from four or six doors across to three, rather than shrinking the type. Icon-only buttons support the Large Content Viewer, so press and hold shows the name. |
| Reduced Motion | Yes | The falling snow, the twinkling stars, the breathing glow, the parallax and the 3D door flip all stop when Reduce Motion is on. Calm mode turns them off independently of the system setting. |
| Dark Interface | Yes | The app is dark in every theme. There is no bright mode that ambushes you at night. |
| Sufficient Contrast | Yes | Every theme has been checked for contrast between text, iconography and the background behind it. The free High Contrast theme goes further still: black ground, white and yellow text, no decoration at all. |
| Differentiate Without Colour | Yes | Nothing in the app is signalled by colour alone. An Advent door says “Wait 3d”, “Open” or “Done” in words, gift-list items carry a tick rather than a colour change, and the sense behind each door is named as well as coloured. |
| Captions | n/a | There is no video and no recorded speech. The music box is an instrumental synthesiser with no vocals. |
| Audio Descriptions | n/a | There is no video content to describe. |
3. A countdown you can hear and feel
The countdown screen has a speaker button. Press it and the app says how many sleeps are left, in the app’s language, at a slightly slower speaking rate than the system default. You can also have it speak automatically every time the app opens, from Settings.
Then it taps the number out. One haptic tap per sleep, up to twelve, about a fifth of a second apart. A child who cannot read numbers yet, or cannot see them, can feel how close Christmas is. This is the part of the app that came most directly out of the research, and it is the part that families mention most.
Each Advent door can be read aloud too, as “Door 12. Festive film. Blanket, favourite Christmas film, lights down.” So can Santa’s reply to a letter, and so can the letter a child wrote in the first place, which matters when the child dictated it rather than typing it.
All of the speech is on the device. Dictation prefers on-device speech recognition, Santa’s replies are composed locally, and nothing a child says or writes is uploaded anywhere.
4. Calm mode and motion
Calm mode is a single switch in Settings, under a heading called Accessibility, and it turns off four things at once: the snow, the sparkle, the parallax that tilts the scene with the device, and the haptics.
It is separate from the system Reduce Motion setting, and the app follows both. Reduce Motion alone stops the animation. Calm mode also stops the vibration, which Reduce Motion does not cover, and which is the thing most likely to be a problem for a child with a sensory processing difference.
Calm mode is stored once and shared, so setting it on the iPhone also sets it on the Apple Watch app. It exists as its own switch on Mac, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro.
Widgets are a special case. They are still pictures rather than animations, so there is no motion in them to turn off, and Calm mode does not change them. What does change them is the theme: pick the free High Contrast theme and the snow, stars and glow disappear from the widgets, the Live Activity and the Apple Watch background as well as from the app.
5. The Advent calendar, designed for low demand
The 24 doors are the heart of the app, and the design rules behind them are deliberate:
- No streaks and no scores. There is nothing to maintain and nothing to break. This was a decision, not an omission.
- A door you missed says “ready to open”, never “missed”. Coming back on the fourteenth to a door from the ninth is completely normal, and the app never says otherwise.
- Locked doors are not buttons. A door for a day that has not arrived announces “wait 3 days” and is not offered as a control, so switch and voice users are not sent to dead targets.
- Marking a door done is optional and reversible. The control announces “Done. Tap to undo.”
- The sense is spoken, not just coloured. Every door announces which sense it is for, in VoiceOver, on the Watch, on Apple TV and in the daily notification.
- The activities accept more than one way of doing them. The letter to Santa can be drawn, signed or recorded as well as written. The carol door suggests humming or signing, and points to the free Makaton Christmas signs. The film door says “subtitles on if they help”.
- Every door is free. There is no door behind a purchase, and there never will be.
Touch targets follow the same care: settings rows are at least 54 points tall, the round action buttons are 54 by 54, and each door tile is 96 points tall.
6. Colour, contrast and themes
There are six themes. Two are free: Classic, and High Contrast. High Contrast is a black background with white and yellow text and no decoration at all, and it is deliberately not part of the paid tier. Charging for the accessible theme would be an odd way to run an accessibility company.
The other four themes are decorative, and they have been measured too: text and iconography keep sufficient contrast against the background behind them in every state. Decoration is the thing that varies between themes, never legibility.
7. Platform by platform
| Platform | VoiceOver | Larger Text | Reduce Motion | Calm mode | Spoken | Haptics |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| iPhone and iPad | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mac | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No hardware |
| Apple Watch | Yes | Yes | Yes | On iPhone | Not yet | Not yet |
| Apple TV | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Not yet | No hardware |
| Apple Vision Pro | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No hardware |
| Widgets and Live Activity | Yes | Yes | Static | Use the theme | n/a | n/a |
The iMessage sticker pack carries an accessibility description on every sticker, so a sticker sent to a VoiceOver user is announced as “Santa’s sleigh” or “On the nice list” rather than as an unnamed image.
The app is translated into 20 languages and sold in 23 App Store storefronts, and VoiceOver speaks the app in the language the app is running in.
8. Known limitations
Everything below is true as of version 2.0. It is listed because a statement that only lists successes is not a statement.
- Turning on Differentiate Without Color changes nothing in the app. That is deliberate rather than missing: no information is carried by colour alone in the first place, so there is nothing for the setting to switch. It is listed here so the behaviour is not mistaken for a bug.
- Reduce Transparency is not yet honoured. The interface uses blurred, translucent panels, and they stay translucent when the system setting is on.
- Bold Text is not yet honoured. Turning the system Bold Text setting on does not thicken the app’s own typeface.
- Apple Watch has no settings screen. Calm mode, the theme and the countdown target are set on the iPhone and sync across. If the Watch app is used entirely on its own, those settings cannot be changed from the wrist.
- Apple TV cannot open a web page, so the privacy policy and terms are printed as plain text in Settings rather than linked.
- The spoken countdown and the haptic tap-out are not on Apple Watch or Apple TV. Both exist on iPhone and iPad; the spoken countdown is also on Mac and Apple Vision Pro. The Watch is the obvious place for a haptic countdown and it is the next thing on this list to be built.
- Calm mode does not reach the widgets. There is no motion in a widget to switch off, but if you want the decoration gone from the Home Screen as well, that is done by choosing the High Contrast theme rather than by Calm mode.
- No independent audit has been carried out. See the next section.
9. Conformance and how it was assessed
Days to Christmas is a native app built with SwiftUI, so the applicable standard is Apple’s accessibility guidance rather than WCAG directly. The app has been designed against the Apple Human Interface Guidelines for accessibility, and against WCAG 2.2 AA where a web success criterion maps sensibly onto a native control.
Assessment method: self-assessment by the developer, using VoiceOver, Dynamic Type at accessibility sizes, and Reduce Motion on real devices, plus contrast measurement across all six themes. There has been no independent third-party audit and no formal conformance claim is made here. Where something has not been verified, this page says so rather than assuming it passes.
10. Feedback
If something in this app does not work with your assistive technology, that is a bug and it will be treated as one. Email info@accessibleresources.com and say what device you use, what assistive technology you use, and what happened. A reply comes from the person who wrote the code.
Reports about the Advent activities themselves are just as welcome. If a door assumes something a child cannot do, it can be rewritten, and the text is translated separately from the code so a change reaches every language.
This statement was last reviewed on 30 August 2026 and applies to Days to Christmas 2.0 on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV and Apple Vision Pro. Accessible Resources Ltd.
