In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), I am sharing a personal project that I’ve been working on whenever I have free time. I started this because I wanted to understand mobile accessibility more deeply and bring it closer to the level of understanding I have with the web. I’ve been jotting down accessibility issues I find in mobile apps I’m quite curious about. And now, I transferred it to Github (opens in a new tab)!

I picked mobile apps because more and more of us are preferring mobile devices for practical reasons. We are also increasingly getting deeply tied to the apps for our everyday needs – banking, shopping, food delivery, fitness, entertainment, cleaning (my favourite ❤️) – you name it. This is exactly why the mobile experience needs to work well for everyone, including people with disabilities. Right now, I feel like mobile accessibility is lagging behind the web. So I wanted to help raise a bit of more awareness around how we can make mobile apps more inclusive.

I’m interested in checking out user flows, not a full audit – say, how well a user can complete a task or where things can trip them up. My goal is to highlight common accessibility gaps we often encounter, and offer practical insights that we can learn from.

Here are some of the take aways that come to mind:

• Spot common patterns and inspire better practices. Once you’ve seen them, you’ll start spotting them everywhere. Then you’ll have an idea or two how to improve it in your own app.
• Encourage open conversations. Describing what the issue is, how it behaves, and what the user might expect can spark dialogues. If I get it wrong or someone sees a better approach, that conversation helps us all improve.
• Get to know WCAG better. I reference the issues I find to WCAG 2.2 criteria to help ground things. It’s not a secret that the guidelines are often nuanced and open to interpretation. It would be nice to engage with them together if I get it wrong, or if its incomplete. The more we share insights, the better we get in understanding and applying them.
• Bridge the awareness gap. Developers aren’t intentionally excluding people or trying to make things harder for fun. Most of the time, they just aren’t aware that barriers exists. As a community we can help by highlighting the issues so they can do what they do best – solve problems and build great experiences!
• See how auditors think. If you’ve ever wondered what a11y folks are looking for when they test apps, this gives you a peek.

Check out the repo and feel free to let me know what you think.

Happy #GAAD!