Mobile Accessibility Design Tips

Sometimes people are unable to interact with their phones using standardized methods. Severe motor control issues, or missing limbs, clearly make manual interaction challenging.

The reality is that accessibility issues affect everyone at different times in their lives. In Microsoft Inclusive Design Toolkit, Microsoft distinguishes between permanent, temporary, and situational impairment:

• A permanent impairment will not change or improve, for example, a missing limb.
• A temporary impairment will get better in time, such as a broken arm that will get better in six weeks’ time.
• The situational impairment will change depending on the situation or environment. For example, carrying a child or heavy boxes, or holding the steering wheel of a car, hinder the use of the phone at that moment.

Thinking about accessibility should not just focus on permanently impaired users. More and more people are temporarily or situationally unable to use a hand from time to time. Rather than overloading an app with interactions, it might be better for the largest number of users if the app was simpler, and had more flexibility around the ways one could interact with it.

You can find out more about Google and Apple’s documentation for designers. As well as listing what gestures are available and showing a video of them in action, the two companies also explain more general guiding principles for gesture-based interaction on their platforms. Google’s page also includes examples of how to indicate that particular interactions might be possible through visuals or animation. In particular, note how providing deliberate instruction is the last resort.

What's your opinion?

Think about the challenges you’ve encountered when interacting with touch interfaces. You might also suggest ways you’ve worked around them or ways they could be improved.

• When do you find interacting with a phone challenging, frustrating, or impossible?
• Does it occur when you’re doing a particular task or when you’re in a particular place?

Share and discuss your responses with others in the Comments.