Accessibility
Services

With built-in accessibility features, APIs, and developer tools, we use iOS properties that provide extraordinary opportunities to deliver a superior mobile experience to customers with a diverse range of abilities.

• iOS VoiceOver is used to allow our apps to focus on UI elements and read the selected text out loud along with adjusting the voice’s dialect and speaking rate for a better user experience.
• The AVSpeechSynthesizer class helps produce synthesized speech from text and provides methods for controlling the progress of ongoing speech.
• We provide accessibility information about the views and controls in the UI to users using UIAccessibility.
• Since VoiceOver doesn’t recognize our app’s custom UI elements by default, additional accessibility information is provided to these elements using accessibilityLabels and accessibilityHints, making the app equally accessible to non-sighted users as well.
• To make the app appealing to different geographic target markets, localization is equally important as accessibility for which we use NSLocalizedString for the element’s description.
• To tackle the chaos that a VoiceOver user might face with a UI that depends on visual cues like the state of a check box, we include descriptive text for VoiceOver to read using accessibilityTraits.

Android Accessibility aims at helping users navigate their devices and with the plethora of accessibility features, makes the use of technology less challenging, especially for those with disabilities.

• Audio hints help users navigate even the simplest of interfaces that convey information graphically using content description, for which we provide informative texts that are localized to cover a wider audience. 
• TA ensures that the user knows about the dynamic change on the state for the elements, like a toggle button or checkbox using setContentDescription().
• Unnecessary descriptions are avoided which may annoy users, like the type of element which will be automatically announced by the Screen reader.
• We handle the graphical elements that are used just for decorative purposes with the attribute important for accessibility.
• To override the Android algorithm that finds the nearest focusable element, we use the attributes nextFocusDown, nextFocusLeft, nextFocusRight,  nextFocusUp.
• We use the labelFor attribute to indicate the relationship between an element and its associated view.
• The hint attribute is used to show text that gives examples of valid input in the element itself, in addition to making this example text available to screen readers.
• We consolidate related elements to help users of assistive technology discover the information that’s on the screen more efficiently using screenReaderFocusable and focusable.

React Native provides well-developed accessibility APIs that are constantly being developed which allows us to create inclusive mobile applications easier. React native implementations vary based on iOS and Android platforms.

• The React Native accessibility APIs integrate the apps with assistive technologies such as screen readers VoiceOver for iOS and TalkBack for Android. 
• Similar to iOS and Android, React Native also provides attributes like accessible, accessibilityLabel, accessibilityHint, accessibilityRole to improve the accessibility of the app.
• These properties will help users understand the element they have selected and the action it will perform with the provided description that is translated and localized.
• Using plugin eslint-plugin-react-native-a11y helps to maintain the code quality and support in identifying places in the codebase that are missing additional accessibility properties.

• We follow the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), an international standard for web accessibility, that develops technical specifications, guidelines, and techniques for accessibility solutions. 
• Another guideline that helps with accessibility is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 which provides a single shared standard for web content accessibility. 
• WCAG is a stable, referenceable technical standard with 12-13 guidelines that are organized as perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.
• WAI-ARIA is another technical specification published by the W3C that specifies how to increase the accessibility of web pages, in particular, dynamic content, and user interface components developed with HTML, JavaScript and related technologies.
• A very common approach a developer can put forth while developing a website is to avoid small fonts since it would be a great advantage for people with poor vision.
• Color blindness is a major visual impairment a large portion of the web users have that narrows the web usage, which can be tackled by using black and white colors in the UI that are considered as universal.
• To make web apps more accessible, always provide alternative texts for the components so that a blind person can easily recognize its purpose.