Welcome to our series on the ICT Symposium’s Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing. 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 3: Test critical issues – Text-to-speech trap, or check out our page with links to all the published Mobile Site and Native App Methodology articles.
1.5: Headset traps
Methodologies: Mobile Site and Native App
Applies to: Headset users
Headset users must always be able to pause and resume media (audio or video) content by using the Pause / Play control on the headset.
About this requirement
Using headset controls is one of the simplest ways to pause and resume audio and/or video content, when the user cannot use the touch screen easily. People with visual impairments (especially Android users) find headset controls very useful, because they allow immediate pausing and resuming of media content. Otherwise they have to navigate through the screen searching for media controls, sometimes hearing a screen reader and the content at the same time. iOS has the magic tap (two-finger-double tap), which allows to pause and resume, but on Android pausing and resuming the content is a difficult experience. For people with physical limitations, headset controls may be much easier to use than a touch screen, and in some cases, may be the only method of pausing and resuming the content.
Therefore, users must always be able to pause and resume media content by headset controls.
A note about iOS testing
In some cases, a video will use the native iOS video player. In this case it is not necessary to test this requirement.
How to test
- Connect a Bluetooth or cable headset to the device. The headset must have a Pause/Play control (usually these are the same controls which receive and end calls).
- Play video and/or audio content.
- Does the media pause when using the control on your headset?
- Using the same control, does the button play the content?
Examples – Mobile Site
Pass 1 – Video can be paused and played with headset controls
Videos played on the YouTube app and Netflix app for Android can be paused and resumed via headset controls.Up Next
That’s all folks!
Over the coming months we will be turning the rest of the mobile methodologies into blog posts, but for now, that’s all folks!
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.