Before I did my research on mobile device accessibility I’ve imagined that mobile device is very inaccessible by default, with big flat surface and almost no reliefs to feel when touching.
Then I thought on – well I guess we could use voice assistants and try to simulate exactly correct accents and voice tones to control the phone. But I was positively surprised when I came to mobile screen-reader examples.
They are really simple and amazing.
You can control a mobile phone with simple gestures, and it can read back to you. There is no need for voice control, some basic finger gestures are all you need.
me, discovering the mobile screen-readers.
Unfortunately not all applications support usage of screen-readers. That’s because their creators did not make apps accessible from scratch. Some hybrid applications are even missing basic mobile accessibility out of the box. When using web-views then developers must also use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, while mobile accessibility is inherently also only a part of them.
There are no separate guidelines for mobile accessibility
With WCAG version 2.1 we got a lot of “hybrid” guidelines that can be applied across devices and so there is no need for special, mobile-only, guidelines (opens in new window). And that is a good thing in my opinion, the concepts are overlapping for all devices, so there is no point to separate them.
W3c has prepared a summary of various technologies developed that increase capabilities of web applications and also how to apply them to mobile content (opens in new window).
It is, as mentioned, crucial to respect same principles also when developing for mobile devices, semantics, responsiveness, forms, media and then in addition some mobile specific points, like user interaction, sensors etc.
Best practices for screen-reader support on mobile devices
We will just scratch the surface here, but there are some crucial technology methods that developers need to respect so that screen-readers are able to take control over applications.
The classical WCAG guidelines apply also for mobile, so good semantics, contrasts, form elements etc. are all a must. But there are also some mobile specific rules to follow.
For example – it is quite common to make some special commands available with special gestures. But these must also be available without special gestures because we must be aware that screen-readers on mobile devices take over all gestures and use them for their own purposes.
So – do not make your app dependable on special gestures only as they could be totally removed or potentially used for some mobile screen reader commands instead.
Both Android and iOS are doing amazing work on accessibility for their operating systems and they are also providing developers with useful resources on mobile accessibility;
- Google, Android: Build more accessible apps (opens in new window),
- Apple: Accessibility on iOS (opens in new window).
