Building Accessible Mobile Products: Google's Learnings

Date & Time

Thursday, March 21, 2024 - 3:20 PM PDT  

Location

Platinum 8  

Description

While web platforms are well-supported with guidance from WCAG & WAI, mobile platforms depend on sparse developer docs from Android & Apple. Our teams at Google noticed this mobile accessibility guidance gap and how the lack of guidance has poorly affected assistive tech user experience within the mobile ecosystem. We established a mobile accessibility working group, creating new guidance for everything from custom accessibility actions to font scaling to complex hardware interactions. We’ve been running an internal training/process with measurable success (~50% reduction in accessibility QA bugs), we’d love to share our learnings! Our session will cover new mobile accessibility guidance and documentation best practices. With updates to Android and iOS released every year, we’ll start with the basics while highlighting newer features like custom accessibility actions and slight differences between the two platforms (e.g. heading semantics). We’ll also share some of our assistive tech user research that informed this new guidance. After attendees get a grasp on the latest guidance, we’ll share best practices for annotating feature specs with accessibility considerations. This part is key - translating guidance to product implementation. Attendees will depart with a template with exercises that they can take back to their team. Lastly, we’ll share a high-level overview of how we incorporate these accessibility specs into our product development process.  

Audience

• Information & Communications Technology
• Research & Development

Audience Level

Beginning  

Session Summary (Abstract)

Need mobile accessibility guidance? Google's got you covered! Learn our latest Android and iOS guidance based on user research. We'll also share best practices for documenting and implementing accessibility in your product development process.  

Primary Topic

Mobile Technology  

Secondary Topics

• Design
• Development
• Digital Accessibility
• Information & Communications Technology (ICT)

 

Session Type

General Track  

Presenter

• Perrin Anto
  Google

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