How can you balance mobile accessibility for better design?

1 Use responsive design

Responsive design is a technique that allows your mobile application or website to adapt to different screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions. It ensures that your content and layout are consistent and readable across various devices, without requiring zooming or horizontal scrolling. Responsive design also helps you avoid duplicating content or functionality for different platforms, which can reduce maintenance and testing efforts. To implement responsive design, you need to use flexible grids, media queries, and relative units in your code, as well as test your mobile application or website on different devices and browsers.

2 Follow accessibility guidelines

Accessibility guidelines are a set of standards and recommendations that help you make your mobile application or website more accessible to people with disabilities. They cover various aspects of mobile accessibility, such as color contrast, text size, keyboard navigation, touch target size, audio and video captions, and alternative text for images. Some of the most widely used accessibility guidelines are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Mobile Accessibility Best Practices. By following these guidelines, you can ensure that your mobile application or website meets the minimum requirements for accessibility and usability.

3 Provide feedback and instructions

Feedback and instructions are essential for mobile accessibility, as they help users understand what is happening on the screen and what actions they need to take. Feedback can be visual, auditory, or haptic, depending on the context and the user's preferences. For example, you can use colors, icons, animations, sounds, or vibrations to indicate the status of an operation, the selection of an option, or the occurrence of an error. Instructions can be text, audio, or video, depending on the complexity and the user's needs. For example, you can use labels, hints, placeholders, tooltips, or tutorials to explain the purpose and functionality of a button, a form field, or a feature.

4 Optimize performance and reliability

Performance and reliability are crucial for mobile accessibility, as they affect the user's experience and satisfaction. Poor performance and reliability can cause frustration, confusion, or abandonment, especially for users with disabilities or low bandwidth. To optimize performance and reliability, you need to minimize the loading time, the data usage, and the battery consumption of your mobile application or website. You can do this by using compression, caching, lazy loading, and other techniques to reduce the size and number of resources you request and deliver. You also need to handle errors gracefully, and provide offline access or fallback options when possible.

5 Test and evaluate your mobile accessibility

Testing and evaluating your mobile accessibility is the final step to ensure that your mobile application or website is accessible and user-friendly for everyone. Testing and evaluating your mobile accessibility involves checking your code for errors and compliance with accessibility guidelines, using automated tools, manual testing, and user testing. Automated tools can help you identify and fix some common accessibility issues, such as missing alt text, low contrast, or invalid markup. Manual testing can help you verify and fine-tune your accessibility features, such as keyboard navigation, touch target size, or feedback and instructions. User testing can help you gather feedback and insights from real users, especially users with disabilities or assistive technologies, such as screen readers, magnifiers, or voice control.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?