Banks are often leading with compliance and conformance and Norway seems to rank very high in digital accessibility and universal design. Accessibility legislation in Norway is pretty mature as well, requiring WCAG 2.0 AA conformance in private sector from basically 2013.
Summary
None of 4 tested native mobile applications conform to any version of Web Content Accessibility guidelines. All of them also fail to provide accessible Portable Document Format (PDF) files (like contracts, invoices and transactions).
All four tested bank applications failed the following WCAG success criteria:
- 1.1.1 – Non-text Content – Level A
- 1.3.1 – Info and Relationships – Level A
- 2.5.3 – Label in Name – Level A
- 4.1.2 – Name, Role, Value – Level A
- 4.1.3 – Status Messages – Level AA
Out of 44 selected WCAG 2.2 success criteria, relevant especially for mobile applications, all banks failed at least 9 of them;
- Bank A failed 9 out of 44 tested WCAG success criteria.
- Bank B failed 12 out of 44 tested WCAG success criteria.
- Bank C failed 15 out of 44 tested WCAG success criteria.
- Bank D failed 15 out of 44 tested WCAG success criteria.
The whole analysis can be checked on a dedicated webpage with more information on my other domain idea-lab.no.
Motivation and additional thoughts
It’s quite easy to check inaccessibility of a website, well, at least get some indication of it, but it’s not so easy to do so with mobile applications. Sure, there are some automatic tools for native mobile applications as well, but they are not so easy to use, often cost money or specific hardware and operating system. I suspect that is also the reason for very few studies of native mobile application accessibility analysis.
Before I did the manual analysis of the apps, I checked existing literature and confirmed my suspicion – comparing to web there are very few. Most of them just using an automatic tool, some of them checked also usability. That was additional motivation for the study – to have a peer reviewed academic study that can be used as a reference.
I like to think it is a time capsule. Because all accessibility analysis are just that. Apps were updated, a week or so after my audits were done and I didn’t check if that mean something for accessibility. It could be improved. It could even be worsened. That’s why I like to think about it as a time capsule, that we can go back to in some later time.
Perhaps after July of 2025? Because then we will also get the European Accessibility Act. And even if Norway is not in the European Union there will be some changes (in Norwegian, opens in new window).
I made a dedicated webpage with more information on my other domain idea-lab.no, that also leads to the whole Universal Design compendium where you can find the poster I presented on page 159. Besides that I strongly recommend checking also other parts of the publication, the conference was amazing and you will find a lot of useful information about universal design and accessibility, also beyond digital.
