Welcome to our series on the ICT Symposium’s Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing. For the next couple of months we will be posting a couple of times a week! We will be posting a series of articles to help testers and developers determine and improve the accessibility of their mobile websites and apps. All this information is already online in Word format, so if you can’t wait check out our page on Mobile testing. Our previous article was Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing, Step 4: Test mobile-specific issues – Day Six, or check out our page with links to all the published Mobile Site and Native App Methodology articles.
Step 5: Test mobile assistive technology and feature support
Mobile devices provide a multitude of accessibility features. As an accessibility tester for mobile devices, it is important that you understand what these features are, how they work, and how they improve an experience for someone with a given disability. As both mobile operating systems and mobile assistive technology are structured in a different manner from their desktop counterparts, it is important that mobile testing is conducted independently from desktop testing of a website. As a rule of thumb, if a website is not compatible with assistive technology designed for the device with which you are testing, it is inaccessible.
Essential content should never be hidden from assistive technology but displayed visually. An example of this would be to use aria-hidden=“true”, which causes the element to be ignored by assistive technology. In addition, aria-hidden=“true”, CSS display:none and CSS visibility can be used to “hide” other content on a page from assistive technology. If this content is meaningful, it should be available to assistive technology.
Any control that changes a state visually should indicate the change of state to the assistive technology user. For example, a hamburger menu that is closed would show an aria-expanded=“false”, and when opened, it would show aria-expanded=“true”. A ratings star that turns yellow when the user selects it should tell the assistive technology user of the change to yellow.
Error that need to be tested
All actionable items and content can be accessed and activated by the following assistive technologies (or when the following feature is enabled):
Recommended iOS combinations
Please note that iOS 13 features, such as Dark Mode and Voice Control are not included in this list. Please also note: as of July 2019, “dynamic type” on iOS does not change the appearance of web pages in Safari.
iPhone:
- VoiceOver
- Keyboard
- Keyboard and switch
- Zoom
- Reduce motion
- Invert colors
- Grayscale
- Reader view and increase text size (for mobile sites)
- Larger text (for native apps)
iPad:
- VoiceOver
- Keyboard
- Keyboard and switch
- Zoom
- Reduce motion
- Invert colors
- Grayscale
- Reader view and increase text size (for mobile sites)
- Larger text (for native apps)
Recommended Android combinations:
- TalkBack
- Keyboard
- Keyboard and switch
- Magnification
- Remove animations
- Invert colors
- Grayscale
- Color correction
- Increase display size
- Increase text size with Android Chrome (for mobile sites)
- Simplified view (for mobile sites)
- Increase font size (for native apps)
Samsung
- Voice Assistant
Kindle
- Voice View
Up Next
Up next for Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing is Critical issue – 1.1: Exit Trap.
Contributors
This document was developed by the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium Mobile Sub-Committee. Members include: Gian Wild (Co-Chair), Peter McNally (Co-Chair), Brent Davis, Corbb O’Connor, Karen Herr, Kathryn Weber-Hottleman, Kathy Eng, Laura Renfro, Megha Rajopadhye, Mona Rekhi, Morgan Lee Kestner, Rafal Charlampowicz, Ryan Pugh, Steve Sawczyn, Sunish Gupta, Tom Lawton and Chris Law This document was developed by the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium Native App Sub-Committee. Members include: Gian Wild (Co-Chair), Jennifer Chadwick (Co-Chair), Kathy Eng, Ryan Pugh, Kathryn Weber-Hottleman, Brent Davis, Laura Renfro, Peter McNally, Karen Herr, Steve Sawczyn, Sunish Gupta, Tom Lawton, Sam Bouchat, Rafal Charlampowicz, Damon Wandke, Morgan Lee Kester, Mona Rekhi, Corbb O’Connor and Chris Law.