UITextView: How to really disable editing?

First of all, you are using setter methods when you could just be using properties. Secondly, you are setting a whole bunch of unnecessary properties that are very close to the default. Here is a much simpler and perhaps what you intended with your code:

Objective-C

- (void)loadTextView1 {
    UITextView *textView1 = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(15, 29, 290, 288)];
    textView1.text = @"Example of non-editable UITextView";
    textView1.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];

    textView1.editable = NO;
    
    [self addSubView:textView1];
    [textView1 release];
}

Swift

func loadTextView1() {
    let textView1 = UITextView(frame: CGRect(x: 15, y: 29, width: 290, height: 288))
    textView1.text = "Example of non-editable UITextView"
    textView1.backgroundColor = .clear

    textView1.isEditable = false

    addSubView(textView1)
}

For Swift 3.0 and Swift 4.0:

textView.isEditable = false

You can use the property editable

textView.editable = NO;

Swift 2.0 Version

self.textView.editable = false

More details can be found in the apple UIKit Framework Reference.

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Additional UITextView Attributes to consider:

• text
• attributedText
• font
• textColor
• editable
• allowsEditingTextAttributes
• dataDetectorTypes
• textAlignment
• typingAttributes
• linkTextAttributes
• textContainerInset