Accessibility
What CueFlip supports today, what it does not, and how to tell us when it gets in your way.
Last updated 7 August 2026
CueFlip exists to remove one physical act from performing: taking a hand off the instrument to turn a page. For players who cannot easily free a hand, that is the whole point of the app rather than a feature of it.
Beyond that, CueFlip supports Dark Interface, Reduced Motion, Sufficient Contrast and Differentiate Without Color Alone. It does not yet meet Apple's bar for VoiceOver, Voice Control or Larger Text — parts of each work well, but not the whole app, and we would rather say so than claim otherwise. The gaps are named below.
These are the accessibility features Apple asks developers to assess, and how CueFlip answers for each on iPhone and iPad. The answers are the same on both.
| Feature | Supported | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dark Interface | Yes | Follows system Dark Mode. The score itself can also be dimmed or inverted. |
| Reduced Motion | Yes | All decorative animation stops. The visible metronome beat is deliberately kept, and softened. |
| Sufficient Contrast | Yes | An almost entirely monochrome interface built from system colours, so Increase Contrast applies throughout. |
| Differentiate Without Color Alone | Yes | Status is always written out in words, not signalled by colour alone. |
| VoiceOver | Not yet | The score, the reader and the metronome are fully operable. Parts of the teaching flow are not properly labelled. |
| Voice Control | Not yet | Same cause: some buttons have no spoken name for “Show names” to display. |
| Larger Text | Not yet | Most of the app scales to the largest accessibility sizes. The controls that float over the score do not. |
| Captions | Not applicable | CueFlip contains no video and no recorded speech, so there is nothing to caption. |
| Audio Descriptions | Not applicable | As above — there is no time-based visual content to describe. |
CueFlip follows the system appearance everywhere and never forces a light interface. Its own surfaces are built from system colours, so turning on Dark Mode darkens the whole app.
A score is a different problem: a PDF is white paper, and a white page is the brightest thing on a darkened stage. The reader therefore offers three display treatments of its own — Paper, Dim, which lays a scrim over the page, and Night, which inverts the page so the notation is light on black. There is also a brightness slider inside the reader, so you can lower the screen without leaving the score to visit Control Centre. These are in the reader; the performance view currently shows the page as it is.
Every animation in CueFlip is routed through a single switch that turns it off when Reduce Motion is on. There is no parallax, no depth simulation, no spinning and no auto-advancing content anywhere in the app. Rolling number readouts, such as the page counter and the tempo, swap in place instead of scrolling.
One animation is deliberately kept: the beat pulse at the edge of the page when the metronome is in Visible mode. It looks like exactly the kind of repeating flash Reduce Motion exists to stop, but in that mode it is the metronome — it is the beat a player who cannot hear the click came for, and removing it would delete the feature rather than calm it. It is softened instead: under Reduce Motion the pulse fades in and out more slowly and gently. Setting the metronome to Audible, or switching it off, removes the motion entirely.
CueFlip's interface is almost entirely monochrome by design — black or white text and controls, with no coloured buttons — and it is drawn with Apple's system colours rather than fixed values. That means the Increase Contrast, Bold Text and Reduce Transparency settings all take effect on CueFlip's own interface without the app having to do anything special.
The score itself is your PDF, and its contrast is a property of the file you imported. Night mode in the reader inverts it, which raises the contrast of a faint or yellowed scan considerably.
Nothing you need in order to perform is signalled by colour alone. The status indicator during a performance carries a small coloured dot, but the state it represents is written out in words immediately beside it, so the colour is redundant rather than load-bearing. Selection is shown by a filled versus an outlined shape, not by tint. The app has no colour-coded charts.
One optional feature does use colour as its subject: when two devices share annotations, you can turn on Colour by author to see who drew what. It is off by default, and turning it off returns every annotation to a single ink colour.
CueFlip's purpose is that pages turn without being touched. You teach a piece once, and from then on the app listens and turns each page as you reach it. For a player who cannot reliably let go of the instrument, or reach the screen, this removes the interaction rather than adapting it.
Every screen that shows a score — performing, reading, and both ways of teaching a piece — accepts page turns from a paired Bluetooth page-turner pedal or a hardware keyboard. CueFlip reads the keys those pedals send (the arrow keys, and Page Up and Page Down), so pedals such as AirTurn, PageFlip, iRig BlueTurn and Donner work once they are paired in iOS Settings, with nothing to configure in the app. The same keys work from any external keyboard, including a Smart Keyboard or Magic Keyboard.
While teaching a piece, a pedal press also records the page turn, so a score can be prepared without touching the screen.
We have not evaluated CueFlip against these and make no claim about them. If you use either, we would like to hear what happens.
The practice metronome has three modes: Audible, Visible and Both. In Visible mode it makes no sound at all and marks time with a pulse around the edge of the page, with a stronger pulse on the first beat of the bar. It was built for playing in an ensemble without adding a click to the room, but it serves equally as a metronome for a deaf or hard-of-hearing player. As noted above, this is the one animation that survives Reduce Motion, because switching it off would be switching off the metronome.
We would rather describe these precisely than leave you to discover them.
Substantial parts of CueFlip work well with VoiceOver, and were built specifically for it. The score is a single adjustable element: swipe up or down to turn the page, and VoiceOver reads the new position. When the app turns a page itself during a performance, that turn is announced. The reader's controls, and the whole metronome panel — tempo, time signature, note value — are labelled and operable.
What is not finished is the flow for teaching a piece. Several controls there are buttons with an icon and no label: the play and undo buttons when teaching from an existing recording, and the adjust and delete buttons on each row of the page-turn review list. VoiceOver will still focus and activate them, but it falls back to reading the icon's name, and because each row of the review list carries the same three icons, it cannot tell you which page turn a button belongs to. The overflow menu inside a library folder has the same problem.
Because Apple's criterion is that every common task be completable with accurate labels, we answer “no” on the App Store rather than “mostly”. Labelling these controls is a small change and is the next accessibility work we intend to do.
This has the same cause. Speaking “Show names” reveals a name for most of CueFlip's controls, but not for the unlabelled buttons described above; those can only be reached by number or by grid. Fixing the labels fixes both features at once.
CueFlip's ordinary screens — your library, teaching a piece, settings, subscription — use Dynamic Type and scale all the way to the largest accessibility sizes. The controls that float over a score do not: the title, the page indicator, the following-status readout and the reader's buttons stop growing at a size a little above the default.
That limit is deliberate. Those controls sit on top of the music, and at accessibility text sizes they would grow to cover several bars of it — which for a low-vision player trying to read the score is a worse outcome than a small label. We have not found a resolution to that tension we are satisfied with, so for now we do not claim the feature. If you use large text with CueFlip, we would genuinely like to know which of the two you would prefer.
Separately, the score itself does not respond to Dynamic Type at all: it is a PDF, and its size is set by pinch-to-zoom. Zooming in and letting pages turn automatically is a workable way to read a score at a large size.
If something in CueFlip is unusable with an assistive technology, please tell us. Accessibility reports are read by the person who writes the app, and they are not queued behind feature requests.
It helps to include which assistive technology you were using, your device and iOS version, and what you were trying to do at the time. If you use VoiceOver, quoting what it read out — or failed to read out — pinpoints the problem faster than anything else.
This page is reviewed with every release. Where our answer changes, it changes here and on the App Store at the same time.
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