Mobile Tech Accessibilities

👩🦰 Persona Spectrum For Inclusive Design (Figma Kit) (https://lnkd.in/eGD38hs4), a wonderful little accessibility tool for designers to include permanent, temporary and situational contexts in design decisions. Open sources, with all illustrations and assets for presentations and print. By 🐝 Mahana Delacour. --- 🔶 1. Accessibility ≠ Compliance We should never rely on automated accessibility testing alone to “ensure” accessibility. Compliance means that a user can use your product, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a great user experience. Manual testing makes sure that your users actually can meet their goals in their own context. It often feels daunting to get started, but small first steps are a great beginning. First, gather people interested in accessibility. Document what research was done, where the gaps are. And then try to include 5–12 users with disabilities in a dedicated accessibility testing. One way to find participants is to reach out to local chapters, local training centers, non-profits and public communities of users with disabilities in your country. You might want to add extra $25–$50 depending on disability transportation. Once you have access to users, run a small accessibility initiative around key flows in your products. Tap into critical touch points and research them. Eventually extend to components, patterns, flows, service design. A good target is to incorporate inclusive sampling into all research projects — at least 15% of usability testers should have a permanent, temporary or situational disability. --- 🔹 2. Building Accessibility Research From Scratch If you’d like to get started, I highly recommend to check “How We’ve Built Accessibility Research at Booking.com” (https://lnkd.in/eq_3zSPJ), a fantastic case study by Maya Alvarado on how to build accessibility practices and inclusive design into UX research from scratch. Maya highlights the idea of extending Microsoft's Inclusive Design Toolkit (https://lnkd.in/eN5J7EkJ) to meet specific user needs of a product. It adds a different dimension to disability considerations which might be less abstract and much easier to relate for the entire organization. And as Maya noted, inclusive design is about building a door that can be opened by anyone and lets everyone in. Accessibility isn’t a checklist — it’s a practice that goes way beyond compliance. A practice that involves actual people with actual disabilities throughout all UX research activities. More resources in the comments ↓

500 students share one computer in Niger. Yet they're conducting advanced physics experiments that students at elite schools can't access. The secret? WebAR turning basic smartphones into portable STEM labs. Think about that. In Sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 10% of schools have internet. Student-to-computer ratios hit 500:1. Yet mobile subscriptions jumped from single digits to 80% in a decade. Students already carry the infrastructure—we just weren't using it right. Traditional EdTech Reality: ↳ VR headsets: $300+ per student ↳ Heavy apps requiring 5G speeds ↳ Labs costing millions to build ↳ Rural schools: permanently excluded The WebAR Revolution: ↳ Runs in any browser, optimized for 3G ↳ No app store, minimal storage ↳ Science scores improving 10-15% ↳ Every smartphone becomes a laboratory But here's what grabbed me: A physics teacher in rural South Africa has one broken oscilloscope. No budget. Her students scan printed markers, and electromagnetic fields pulse across their desks. They run experiments infinitely—no equipment damaged, no reagents consumed. One student told her: "Engineering is for people like me now. The lab fits in my pocket." What changes everything: ↳ Mobile-first matches actual connectivity ↳ Browser-based works offline ↳ Teachers need training, not new buildings ↳ Inequality becomes irrelevant The Multiplication Effect: 1 teacher with markers = 30 students experimenting 10 schools sharing content = communities transformed 100 districts adopting = educational equality emerging At scale = STEM education without infrastructure gaps We spent decades waiting for labs that won't arrive. Now any browser becomes one. Because when a student in rural Africa explores the same 3D molecules as someone at MIT—using the phone already in their pocket—you realize: WebAR isn't shiny technology. It's a quiet equaliser making world-class STEM education fit into 3G connections and $50 phones. Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld for innovations where accessibility drives transformation. ♻️ Share if you believe quality education shouldn't require perfect infrastructure.

When we think about human-computer interaction, most of us picture fingers on a keyboard or swipes on a touchscreen. But what happens when those aren’t options? That’s the reality for millions of people living with paralysis or other mobility challenges. And it’s exactly the kind of barrier that a startup called Augmental is tackling - with a device that might shift how we all think about accessibility. Their innovation, MouthPad, is a wearable interface that sits inside the mouth and lets users control phones and computers using their tongue and head movements. It sounds futuristic, but for those who can’t rely on traditional input methods, it’s a doorway to independence. What’s powerful here isn’t just the technology - it’s the shift in mindset. Inclusive design like this doesn’t just “accommodate” people; it actively expands what’s possible. And history shows us that when we build with accessibility in mind, we often create solutions that benefit far more people than we initially imagined. Think of voice assistants, predictive text, or even video captions - many of these were originally developed for accessibility, but now serve a much wider audience. Have you seen similar efforts from startups or researchers in your part of the world? #innovation #technology #future #management #startups

Apple's 2026 accessibility roadmap just landed ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Here are a few new features that stood out: VoiceOver uses on-device AI for richer descriptions of images, scanned documents, and personal records, with follow-up questions in natural language Voice Control moves to natural language navigation, no more memorizing exact labels or numbered overlays Accessibility Reader handles scientific papers, tables, and translation while preserving custom formatting Apple Vision Pro can now control compatible power wheelchairs via eye tracking (with Tolt and LUCI), collapsing the wall between assistive tech and productive tech On-device subtitles for any uncaptioned video, across devices When the tech you rely on to read a document, navigate an app, or move through a building doesn't work for your body or brain, the labor market is closed before you apply, Announcements like this shift the baseline of what's possible, But the best assistive tech in the world can't fix a hiring funnel that filters disabled candidates out before they reach a human, Tools matter, and so do the people building the systems around them. Full piece in Forbes 👇 https://lnkd.in/gPyKpde2

AI is helping visually-impaired athletes navigate races. Not in theory. In practice. Right now. Wearables like the Wayband from WearWorks have been tested in real race environments, including an attempted navigation of the New York City Marathon by blind runner Simon Wheatcroft, using vibration based cues instead of sight. Not flawless. Not finished. But a real step toward more independent movement. Researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and other Universities are developing AI systems that detect obstacles, identify safe paths, and translate the environment into non- visual guidance for people with low or no vision. Early-stage. But promising work that’s already reshaping what’s possible. Accessibility tools for color-blind athletes Focus on clearer visual design, contrast improvements, and better visibility of boundaries and signals. Practical upgrades. Real-world impact. This is what accessibility should look like. Not an afterthought. A direction. Because when technology increases, So does someone’s independence on the course, That’s not disruption. That’s progress. The kind that opens the starting line to more people, not fewer. And that same belief drives everything We’re building at Ruley, the E-Referee. Tech that makes understanding fair play universal.

Accessibility case study: Spotify When we talk about accessibility leaders in the Nordics, most people think of IKEA. But there’s another name worth celebrating: Spotify. ✨ A few highlights: ▷ Accessible by default: their design system, Encore, has an “Encore x Accessibility” track. Many components come with accessibility built-in, and for edge cases, designers get clear, practical guidance. In other words: devs don’t need to reinvent the wheel — accessibility is baked in. ▷ Guidelines that scale: Spotify even shares their Accessibility Guidelines for Developers openly. They’re structured into “quick wins,” “medium-term wins,” and “intensive wins.” It’s a roadmap teams can actually use, not just a wish list. ▷ Research that listens: when they redesigned Your Library, they didn’t just crunch numbers. They combined quant data (how people use the app) with qual feedback (interviews, beta testing) to understand the “why” behind the struggles. That balance is rare, and it shows in the end product. ▷ Nothing about us without us: Spotify partnered with Fable, a community of people with disabilities, to test their products and shape their upcoming Accessibility Plan. Over 100 people with lived experience gave feedback across vision, hearing, mobility, cognition, and speech. That’s accessibility grounded in reality, not theory. 🚀 Why does this stand out compared to others? Lots of companies are still at the stage of “raising awareness” or “appointing an accessibility officer.” Spotify is already embedding accessibility into the tools, workflows, and research methods that shape their everyday product decisions. That’s the shift: from side project to core practice. ⚠️ Gaps & real-world limits: ▷ Scale + legacy product complexity: large platforms must balance many priorities; rolling out accessibility universally across all surfaces (mobile apps, web players, embedded widgets, third-party integrations) takes time. Public work shows progress but also ongoing work. ▷ Content ecosystem challenges: user-generated content (podcasts, artist uploads, social clips) creates variability — captioning and metadata quality depend heavily on creators and tooling. This is an industry-wide gap, not unique to Spotify. 🔎Lessons for companies: ▷ Start with people, not checklists. Invest in user research with people who actually use assistive tech; let the data drive product choices. ▷ Make accessibility social inside the company. Run regular meetups, internal talks, and learning series so the knowledge spreads beyond a single team. ▷ Partner early with specialists & communities. External partners bring lived experience, accelerate learning, and reduce the risk of misguided solutions. ▷ Plan for content & ecosystem complexity. Where creators supply content, invest in creator tools (easy captioning, templates) and moderation/quality flows. ▷ Measure & be transparent. Track accessibility metrics and be honest about scope and remaining work — transparency builds trust.

When I asked a visually impaired developer to review the accessibility of four popular iOS apps, he made a surprising discovery. All four were making the same big accessibility mistake… They built interactive elements without telling blind users what they are - or even that they exist at all. This was the finding of Diogo Melo, a mobile app developer who is himself blind, who I engaged at Welldone Consulting to undertake a research project to analyse the accessibility of four popular UK not-for-profit apps. For each of the four, he found that custom-built buttons and interactive components were never assigned the correct accessibility trait (iOS accessibility specialist Rob W. has also previously written about how critical these are!). Why is this a problem? To a sighted user, a button can be made to look like a button with the help of graphic design. That type of visual motif doesn’t benefit a visually impaired user. It’s vital that instead, accessibility software like Apple’s VoiceOver is given the necessary context to indicate an interactive element accurately. Without it, visually impaired users don’t know a button is there, and aren’t able to interact with it. In my last post on this research I mentioned a terms and conditions tickbox at the outset of using an app, which Diogo was unable to interact with. This was an example of a missing accessibility trait. But the problems stretch deeper across all four apps - with accessibility traits missing from… - Donation method options - Text fields (meaning they can’t be completed) - Buy buttons - Back buttons (a significant barrier to basic navigation) - Event listings …and many more. What’s intriguing is that in principle, the fix here is simple - assign the correct trait. Yet all four apps are missing these. It’s a must that they’re implemented. Without it, the work done throughout the rest of the app to optimise for accessibility is wasted. For me, it points to a systemic gap in how accessibility is considered during development. So often that gap presents as a lack of consistency. For accessibility optimisation to be effective, consistency is key. When the consistency isn’t there, any good work that might have been performed to make an app accessible is so quickly undone. But when it is, a rising tide raises all ships - a clearer, more flexible design that improves the experience for everyone. . . . Image alt text: Two smartphone screens are shown side by side. On the left hand side smartphone screen, large text reads ‘What sighted users see’. Underneath this text is: 1) A turqoise-coloured button with text reading ‘Donate now’ 2) A white text entry field with light grey text reading ‘Enter email address’ 3) A smaller dark blue coloured button with text reading ‘Sign up’ On the right hand side smartphone screen, large text reads ‘What a blind user’s screen reader hears’. Underneath this text are four small grey buttons, each with a question mark overlaid. 

The W3C’s new draft guidance on applying WCAG 2.2 to mobile apps, WCAG2Mobile, is a big step forward for mobile accessibility. This isn’t a new standard. It’s a clarifying resource to help developers and accessibility professionals interpret WCAG success criteria in the mobile context, where factors such as native gestures, hybrid apps, and diverse assistive technology support create real challenges. The draft offers: - Mobile-specific terminology to align accessibility language with mobile development - Criterion-by-criterion guidance tailored for mobile apps - Platform-specific insights to account for differences across iOS, Android, and web For teams building mobile experiences, this guidance makes accessibility more achievable — not more complex. It’s early days. The draft is open for feedback, and the accessibility community’s input will shape its future. If mobile accessibility is part of your roadmap, this is a must-read: https://lnkd.in/eJmXYNin #WebAccessibility #WCAG #W3C

One of the reasons I'm proud to work at Meta: we don't treat accessibility as an afterthought. For Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we are sharing how our AI glasses are changing daily life for people with disabilities — from a blind veteran who can now read menus on date night, to a quadriplegic Marine capturing hands-free photos of his baby. We're also rolling out new features like voice-controlled calls, one-touch AI shortcuts, and real-time captions — plus some incredible EMG research that's letting people with paralysis play video games through muscle signals alone. This external blog highlights more stories. https://bit.ly/4tJcsVA #GAAD #Accessibility #MetaAI #WearableTech #AssistiveTechnology