Updated: January 21, 2025
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According to the WHO, 15% of the world’s population experiences some form of disability. In most cases, aware societies strive to balance health disparity so that this population cohort doesn’t feel any barriers to an acknowledged quality of life. And it works just fine until a person with a disability faces a situation when something is out of their reach because of poor mobile app accessibility.
Our developers and UX/UI designers will walk you through what can be done to increase the accessibility of your mobile app and provide time-tested tips on simplifying the task with the help of generative AI.
Why does mobile accessibility matter?
Making your applications inclusive isn’t a matter of social responsibility only. Along with diversity cultivation, accessible mobile applications unlock an additional revenue stream, give your company competitive tailwinds and help meet compliance regulations.
Empathy
As we age, we all face some limitations, be it impaired hearing, lowered sense of vision, or motor impairment. Moreover, situational and temporary disabilities can put all of us into similar settings that individuals with a long-term disability have. Therefore, mobile accessibility is a long-term investment that, among other things, helps us take care of the older generation, our older selves, and those struggling with the temporary condition.
Assistive technology is also an important strategy to better integrate people who face additional challenges into the modern world and online communities.
Competitive advantage
According to statistics, one in six people has a disability. By making your solution inclusive, you cover an additional 61 million users, which expands the user reach of your application.
Besides, tech inclusion is commercially interesting. The buying power of people with disabilities is around $13 trillion. Considering the number of inaccessible apps, your app and mobile device accessibility can reel in this additional revenue stream.
Mobile phone accessibility also reduces the operational costs of your business. A Dutch SNS Bank reduced the number of call center calls and associated expenses by over 15%. The savings are associated with mobile web accessibility changes the bank made earlier.
Accessibility makes better tech for everyone
Tech inclusion is essential to some, but useful for all. Closed captions, virtual assistants, and speech recognition software are the go-to features for all users, including people with disabilities. Voice route directions, for example, are both an accessibility feature and a hand-free option for drivers. Therefore, making your solution all-in will benefit everyone.
Compliance with standards and regulations
In many cases, mobile app accessibility standards are required by law. The Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design, or ADA, mandates the inclusion of all people, in all areas of public life, including web-based businesses and their applications.
The ADA law also works alongside the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) which documents a single shared standard for web content accessibility. The current WCAG version 2.2 was published in October 2023.
By 2025, all EU-based companies must also optimize their services and products for accessibility to comply with the European mobile app accessibility guidelines.
Better brand image
Finally, digital accessibility benefits your brand and creates more opportunities for brand advocates, as up to 73% of customers believe that a company should take a clear stand on social issues.
How to ensure mobile app accessibility?
As of today, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, or WCAG, are considered to be the benchmark for website accessibility. The guidelines also feature WCAG for mobile, which outlines mobile accessibility best practices. Below, we’ll talk about what your application should be like to be truly accessible according to WCAG.
Keep in mind that each principle includes three levels of conformance, where A is the minimum level and AAA stands for full conformance. Most organizations strive to score AA as a golden mean.
Perceivable
Making your solution perceivable means that users must be able to perceive it with one or a few senses. In simple words, if your app’s content is geared towards a visual experience, it should have an alternative that involves auditory perception or any other sensory modality.
What can be the problem here?
- No text alternatives
Some solutions may fail to offer text alternatives for non-text content featured on screen, be it controls or images, in a way that is perceivable by the screen’s reader. It inherently makes the app unreadable for TalkBack or VoiceOver, which are default screen readers on Android and iOS respectively.
On the contrary, speech descriptions make all non-text data accessible for the blind or people with low or weak vision. Facebook, for example, has rolled out automatic ALT text to describe visual content for screen readers.
- No adaptability
A mobile solution overlooks accessibility when its structure isn’t readily adjustable to different content presentation structures and orientations. In particular, an inclusive product can switch to both landscape and portrait without sacrificing content or elements just like the example below.
Native mobile app accessibility guidelines also require your product to mark up information, structure, and hierarchy between elements. This way, headings, tables, and lists will remain intact when the presentation changes, keeping your layouts simple and consistent.
— Dzmitry Shchyhlinski, Head of Backend Development and Solution Architect, *instinctools
Adaptability is essential for people with motor impairments, screen reader users, as well as people with learning difficulties and cognitive fatigue.
- No distinguishing features
Inadequate contrast, a poor choice of colors, or the absence of text resizing take a toll on users’ perception. For instance, people with color perception issues struggle to distinguish between certain colors. Therefore, colors shouldn’t be the only way to convey differences or prompt action. Instead, combine color and text or character cues to convey information.
Loss of content or functionality is another common accessibility issue that typically occurs when a visually impaired user zooms the text. Your mobile accessibility settings must allow for increasing by up to 200% while retaining all content and elements.
Operable
This principle necessitates your application to include fully-operable interface and navigation elements so that the user can make use of every feature regardless of impairments or disabilities.
What can be the problem here?
- Lack of time
Given the diversity among people, it’s difficult to predict how much time it takes to browse through the app or find a specific section. Most banking applications, for example, have a maximum session time as a security measure. However, time limits or time-sensitive content makes it inconvenient for a screen reader or an elderly user to process information.
Flexible time limits or the turn-off option, on the contrary, make your application more friendly to seniors, sight-impaired persons, or foreign speakers.
- Flashing content
Blinking content is a red flag for inclusive applications as it can provoke seizures or other undesirable effects. Thus, individuals who have photosensitive seizure disorders simply cannot look at flashing lights or contrasting visual patterns without having an adverse physical reaction triggered by them. That’s why it’s important to avoid content that flashes over 3 times in 1 second and limit the area of flashing to a small portion of a smartphone’s screen.
- Navigation
Navigation that is neither programmatically tagged nor structured can also prevent a user from consuming the content. It holds especially true for visually disabled users that can only navigate your application with assistive technology as well as people with cognitive and motor disabilities.
Landmark regions, descriptive headers, unique screen titles, and labeled controls enable both users and screen readers to locate the needed section quickly and with fewer keystrokes. The application can also be coded to skip graphics and navigation links when consuming the content with a screen reader.
— Aliaksei Saukhin, UI/UX Designer, *instinctools
Tastemade, for instance, is a great example of full-screen navigation at work, while the example on the right sacrificed discoverability for a sleek design.
Understandable
According to this accessibility principle, all information and your entire user interface must be easy to grasp for any person regardless of their health status. Simply put, the more intuitive and straightforward your application is, the more chances it has to score the AAA conformance level.
What can be the problem here?
- Predictability
Some applications prefer to hide design elements behind sophisticated icons or employ futuristic user flows. While such designs are admirable works of art, they lack clarity.
Hamburger menus, for example, are a widely accepted standard for mobile app development that simplifies menus for compact screens. However, they are neither navigable nor predictable for people with visual disabilities, cognitive limitations, motor impairments, and reduced dexterity. The desktop version of Telegram, for example, has a hamburger menu button.
The overriding objective of predictable design is to set accurate expectations about what will happen next through consistent design patterns, standard semantic elements, and ordered information structure. An accessible application should also have all elements easily discoverable on the screen to give an accurate understanding of where the user is now. Bottom navigation, vertical sidebar, or sticky menus play it right.
— Aliaksei Saukhin, UI/UX Designer, *instinctools
- Input assistance
Some users with lower quality vision, and with reading and intellectual disabilities may find it challenging to enter the information error-free or differentiate between mandatory and optional fields. To provide assistance, an application interface can include cues in the fields to reinforce important information.
The cues may range from labeled attributes for screen readers to select states and rounded corners.
- Error prevention
On the same note, typical error indication methods may not work for individuals with low or impaired vision or color-blind people. Likewise, users with reading or motor disabilities have a higher chance of entering the wrong input, which can lead to serious consequences, including financial liabilities. Therefore, if the application doesn’t provide user-controllable data, it is not accessible.
Reversible submissions, order confirmation, deleting a record, or unsending a message are some examples of safeguards that will keep users from making a mistake.
— Aliaksei Saukhin, UI/UX Designer, *instinctools
Robust
Accessibility features should be seamlessly delivered across platforms and devices, including different versions of screen readers, braille terminals, or text magnification software. In simple words, robust design is immune to coding errors that can distort the content or functions in a web-enabled device or assistive technology.
What can be the problem here?
- Poor coding
If the HTML code behind your application lacks complete start and end tags, the app’s content may display differently across devices, not display at all, or be unreadable to assistive technologies. Well-formed HTML code that conforms to all markup language specifications makes sure that the accessible content structure will remain as intended across all platforms and devices.
Can cross-platform development provide a proper level of accessibility?
Cross-platform development is a Swiss army knife that accelerates time to market and kills two platforms with a one-code base. However, the accessibility potential of cross-platform development lags behind native applications. Therefore, cross-platform technologies are a tradeoff between accessibility and cost reduction, which can still guarantee at least a basic level of mobile accessibility on Android and iOS.
Thus, Flutter app development is committed to making apps more accessible and includes built-in support for accessibility combined with the same capabilities of the operating system. Flutter can help you implement such accessibility features as large fonts, screen reader compatibility, sufficient contrast, and more.
But keep in mind that mobile accessibility is a collective result of your whole development team, including Flutter developers. While UX/UI designers are dedicated to building inclusive interfaces, QA specialists make sure your final app version passes accessibility testing.
Trust gen AI tools to review your app for accessibility issues
In the pre-AI era, accessibility excellence required intensive research and know-how from the development team. Tuning together inclusive features and a crispy interface may still be tricky, but the rise of AI-powered tools has fast-tracked resolving accessibility-related issues.
For instance, UX/UI designers don’t have to manually review apps’ interfaces to spot accessibility defects. Software such as Stark, Userway, and Google’s Accessibility Scanner can automate the task.
These tools are indispensable at the product design stage, where they scan Figma, Adobe, or Sketch files for compliance with WGAG and ADA requirements, fix minor issues, and highlight violations that require the UX designer’s input.
There’s no need to decide between accessibility and design
Equal access to technology allows all people to actively participate in society and leverage tech comforts. Along with compliance conformity, mobile accessibility also contributes to a larger user base and competitive edge of your company.
If you struggle to strike a balance between accessibility and design, our company knows how to score on both. Based on your unique requirements and accessibility standards, we seamlessly integrate inclusivity into a top-notch app design. Drop us a line to create a top-grade mobile solution that caters to all.
