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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>me, discovering the mobile screen-readers.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are no separate guidelines for mobile accessibility<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
With WCAG version 2.1 we got a lot of “hybrid” guidelines that can be applied across<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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).<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Best practices for screen-reader support on mobile devices<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Google, Android: Build more accessible apps (opens in new window)<\/a>,<\/li>
- Apple: Accessibility on iOS (opens in new window)<\/a>.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mobile accessibility is also a part of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and has been updated in WCAG 2.1. Using a screen-reader on mobile is quite an experience. If developers made apps accessible…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[91,90,14,7],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-practical-a11y","tag-android","tag-ios","tag-mobile","tag-wcag2-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cerovac.com\/a11y\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}