Mobile Accessibility, Challenges, and Best Practices

Abstract

Mobile technologies can provide unprecedented benefits to persons with disabilities-- they can increase productivity at work and/or school, improve safety, reduce isolation, provide text messaging, text-to-speech and voice recognition, e-mail and calendaring, scanning and read text aloud, GPS navigation and many other useful functions. But how accessible and usable are the mobile applications to users with disabilities? Can users with disabilities benefit from mobile communications technology as much as the rest of the world is doing? What are the challenges for users with disabilities? Are there any best practices for mobile applications? In this session we provide an overview on the current state of accessibility of mobile applications. We will also demonstrate some of the accessibility/usability challenges that users with disabilities are facing with mobile application. And finally, we introduce best practices that could lead to universally accessible mobile applications by default if they are followed properly.