Accessible Mobile Apps (Bi)Weekly - Issue #40

Hey everyone,

Mark your calendars for May 18th because it's Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)!

If you're unfamiliar, this is a day is meant "to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments." You can participate in an event listed on their website, and even contribute directly by captioning a video, writing a blog post about accessibility, or making a Youtube video demonstrating how you use assistive technology. (See more here)

This year, I captioned one of the iOS videos made by my friend Tunde (If you're an iOS engineer, I highly recommend his content.):

What are you doing for GAAD? Let me know! I'd love to feature it in the next newsletter.

As always, don't hesitate to reach out with any suggestions for the next issue via email (hello@accessiblemobileapps.com) or Twitter (or Mastodon).

- Robin

In Her Own Words: Slack’s Sommer Panage advocates for accessibility

"Mobile accessibility was a niche and largely undocumented specialty when Sommer Panage began her tech career. The industry has made significant progress since then, but it still has a long way to go to become truly inclusive of people with disabilities, she believes and its her mission to get it there." - bizJournals.com

May 8th: Do you speak Accessibility? - A look at accessibility hurdles for language learning and linguistics

"One would think that language has been solved in 2023. We have translation apps, sign languages, an international phonetic alphabet that is supposed to be able to represent any sound in any language for academics to endlessly discuss over. And yet, the challenges are myriad. From screen readers not knowing how to pronounce the ultimate guide to pronouncing things to less than helpful apps and from several different alphabets to unhelpful, incorrect language tagging, the topic of linguistics accessibility can be a wonderfully twisty-turny rabbit hole to go down. For the last few years I’ve been looking into this, and I have learned loads of different things. This talk aims to take the audience through some of those learnings." - a11ytalks.com

Why ‘dark mode’ causes more accessibility issues than it solves

"Dark mode causes something called “halation” which massively impacts how people with astigmatism perceive digital interfaces." - medium.com

WCAG 2.2 Guidelines: What We Know So Far, New Features (with examples)

"Although WCAG 2.2 hasn’t officially been released yet, the drafted success criteria have been available already." - bootcamp.uxdesign.cc

Hogwarts Legacy brings new accessibility feature for arachnophobic players

"The Arachnophobia Mode, which is available in the in-game accessibility options, can be enabled to dial down the immersion in spider-infested areas of the game world. Turning the mode on changes the appearance of spiders and dampens or even completely removes the spider “skitters” and “screeches”." - gadgetsNow.com

iOS

iOS 17 Custom Accessibility Mode

"iOS has been a great UI for accessibility settings, but Apple may take it one step further on the 17th iteration with “Custom Accessibility Mode.” This was originally hidden away on an iOS 16.2 beta last year, and it showed how users could completely replace and change everything about the normal Lock Screen and Home Screen — removing the dock, making the home screen icons larger, and making UI elements all the more accessible." - laptopMag.com

Android

May 10th: Google shares I/O 2023 session list, including What’s new in Android, Material Design, and gen AI

Google I/O will have a session after the keynote called "What's new in Android Accessibility" : "Learn about new Android accessibility features and developer updates to help you build apps for everyone." - 9to5google.com

Join the Accessible Mobile Apps Slack Group

Use this link to join our Slack workspace for mobile accessibility. Ask technical questions, share resources, get advice from other developers, and most importantly connect with developers who share your passion for a11y.