New report shows mobile apps can improve accessibility

People with disabilities face relentless accessibility barriers, from using physical spaces to navigating online experiences. There’s a long list of things to do to make their daily lives easier and fully accessible, including the necessary accessibility tweaks to our beloved mobile apps.

Digital design company diamond released its last State of Accessibility Report (SOAR) on December 8, documenting the digital accessibility of popular sites and downloaded apps, including TikTok, YouTube, and kids’ apps like the many Toca Boca games that dominate app stores. This is the first year the company has collected data specifically on mobile apps.

Diamond followed the guidelines of the Web Accessibility Initiative, a digital accessibility standards initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium, which is a network of professionals who develop web development standards. Those the guidelines are detailed and cover everything from website development to user experience for online videos, text and images.

This year, the Web Accessibility Initiative released more guidance on mobile-specific accessibility, which emphasizes how existing and accessible web design should also apply to all applications: things like custom text size options, navigation buttons for screen readers and clear image descriptions should be added to all devices.

In addition to its analysis of the most visited websites, Diamond’s report looked at the top 20 free apps in the iOs and Android app stores, as well as the top 20 paid apps in each. It found that 65% of free iOS apps and 75% of Android apps met accessibility standards; surprisingly high figures according to the organization. But paid apps on the whole failed – only 35% of iOS apps and 29% of Android apps passed accessibility tests. This could be because paid apps typically have fewer users and therefore less performance return, Diamond explains in his report.

Diamond looked at four accessibility features of each app: the app’s ability to change its orientation from portrait to landscape, the ability to resize text within the app, providing alternative text descriptions of images, and compatibility with screen readers. The above scores are just averages of each of these standards, with app categories doing significantly worse for some requirements than others.

These features are especially important as more and more people use their phones as their primary device — at least 85% of Americans use a smartphone, and 15% of them say they use their phone exclusively for surfing the Internet, according to a Pew Research Center poll. For Americans with disabilities, these numbers are slightly lower, with only 72% use smartphones regularly.

Mobile apps are used for news, banking, medical records, etc., and not just for social connections. These devices and applications must therefore be designed with all users in mind.

Early developmental changes hold the answers, the report says. Here’s how our most downloaded apps disappointed disabled users and what creators can do to improve them.

Orientation of the phone

An important mobile accessibility standard addressed by Diamond and the Web Accessibility Initiative is the ability to orient an app’s screen from portrait to landscape. According to Diamond’s manual testing of free apps, only 28% of iPhone apps and 25% of Android apps reoriented their screens for users who needed to use their devices in specific positions.

For mobile apps to be fully accessible, according to the Web Accessibility Initiative, they must support both phone orientations, vertical and horizontal. This is useful for users who need to keep their phones in fixed positions, such as mounted on the arm of a wheelchair, the initiative explains. And if a screen’s orientation automatically changes in the app, it should be able to notify a screen reader, which helps blind users.

Text resizing

Text resizing is also a crucial aspect of user-based design and ensures that the visual settings of a user’s phone are transferred to a downloaded application. If a visually impaired user has a larger text setting to make it easier to navigate on their phone, for example, the app font should change with it.

Among the top 20 free apps, 28% of iPhone apps and 52% of Android apps resize text. According to the report, this failing standard is an easy fix.

The new iOS 15 has just been added custom text resizing for most applications, which can make it easier for the user to navigate. Find these options by adding the “Text Size” tool to your phone’s control center in settings. Once inside an app, swipe up the control center from the top right corner of your screen. Then click on the “Aa” text size widget and change your text size up or down. Swipe the bottom button to the left to apply settings to the app only, or leave it on “All apps” to change device settings. (This applies to all your current apps and those that will be added in the future.)

Credit: Mashable

Credit: Mashable

Alternate text for images

Where apps have seemed to make the most progress in accessibility are alternative text descriptions for images and other visual graphics. About 82% of free iOS apps and 77% of Android apps have built-in, readable text descriptions for what Diamond calls “informative images.”

However, more than half of paid iOS tests failed, and Android was even worse, with 75% of paid apps not including usable text descriptions.

The Web Accessibility Initiative has a simple List of tips and tricks to write alternative text descriptions for visual graphics on websites and apps.

Headers for screen readers

Finally, Diamond tested an application’s headers for registration screens, login and logout functions, and menus. These should be easily handled by the screen reading functions of the phones (often used by the blind or visually impaired). Again, free apps dominated paid apps: 97.5% of free iOS apps and 95% of Android apps were successful, while only 50% of paid iOS apps and 10% of Android apps had accessible titles.

Registration and login screens must be compatible with screen-reading devices, including clearly separated “Login” or “Register” buttons, clear headers for filling in form fields, and means Navigate CAPTCHA requirements that are not accessible to people with disabilities. These are simple fixes that help users and the app itself – an easier login process equals more registered users using your app daily.

The accessibility checklist doesn’t stop at these standards — there are many small ways app designers can make their technology more accessible, like making sure buttons are easily accessible by people with various physical disabilities and making apps compatible with gesture tools like those on the iPhone Support contact. These data are the starting point for a necessary overhaul of digital devices, to facilitate everyone’s daily scrolling.