Make your iPad and iPhone apps accessible

I’ve never built an iOS application, and I don’t know if I will. If I were to start dabbling with it some day I do know that I would want to make sure the applications I build are as accessible as the platform allows.

Thanks to the accessibility features of iOS, the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch can all be quite accessible, particularly to visually impaired users. It does require that developers keep accessibility in mind while building their app, but fortunately that does not seem to involve a lot of work.

For an introduction, read Matt Legend Gemmell’s article Accessibility for iPhone and iPad apps. It’s a rather long article, but well worth your time since you will not only find out what you need to do to make sure your app is accessible – you may also feel a bit more motivated to actually do it.

There is a lot of information available to help developers build accessible Web sites and Web applications. I see far fewer articles like this one talking about making desktop or mobile applications accessible though. It could be because building stuff for the Web is what I do, not creating standalone applications, or it could be because there really is less talk about accessibility in that context. I don’t know, but I hope it’s the former.

Posted on January 9, 2011 in iOS, Accessibility