What Is Mobile Accessibility?
Mobile accessibility is about how we make websites and applications better accessible to people with disabilities when they are using mobile phones and other devices.
Mobile Accessibility Testing is the process that is followed to assess a mobile web, native or hybrid app. This process evaluates how effectively the content and services are accessible to the people with disabilities. Very simple design perspectives such as font size and color schemes are evaluated to verify whether they make it more or less difficult to access the app's services and content.

Which Tools Are Available To Perform Mobile Accessibility Testing?
The following tools can be evaluated by teams to perform mobile accessibility testing:
VoiceOver is a built-in tool native to iOS. It enables QA engineers to validate the guidelines recommended in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. By default, it is disabled but can be enabled from iPhone’s settings. Once enabled, it starts narrating the content to the users which allows testers to perform accessibility testing.
Color Contrast is a free native app available in the App Store. It allows QA engineers to measure the contrast between two colors. QA teams can validate whether the app under test meets the guidelines as recommended in WCAG 2.1.
A11yTools is a paid native app available in the App Store. QA engineers can take a screenshot on iPhone and annotate the accessibility errors to software development team.
Xcode’s Accessibility Inspector
QA engineers can download Xcode from the Mac App Store for free. Choose Xcode > Open Developer Tool > Accessibility Inspector from the menu bar to launch the Accessibility Inspector. Once launched, you can validate the properties, values, action methods, and position of objects that are under test.
TalkBack is a built-in tool native to Android. This tool allows QA engineers to validate the guidelines recommended in WCAG 2.1. Once enabled, engineers can emulate the user scenarios that the blind and vision-impaired users experience with their devices.
Switch Access is a built-in tool native to Android. It provides QA engineers the capability to verify and validate the guidelines recommended in WCAG 2.1. QA engineers can emulate the use-case scenarios that people with dexterity impairments actually go through while using the apps thereby helping the business to improve their app’s user experience.
Accessibility Scanner for Android
Accessibility Scanner is a free native app available in the Google Play Store. It provides recommendations about the scope of improvements for Android apps from accessibility perspective. Examples of these improvements are increasing contrast and enlarging small touch targets so that app becomes more user-friendly from accessibility standpoint.
Tips And Tricks For Mobile Accessibility Testing

- Work with a combination of tools rather than relying on a single tool
- Select the tools depending on the type of requirements
- Give importance to native and built-in tools
- Do not completely ignore third party tools; at times they prove to be better than native tools
- Utilize multiple techniques such as screen readers, voice-to-text, voice-enabled searches, screen magnifiers, screen brightness, and analyzing color ratio
- Verify benchmarks that are defined as per accessibility guidelines and standards. For example, WCAG 2.1, Section 508 compliance requirements
- Do not rely completely on automation because it may not catch all the bugs; perform manual accessibility audits alongside
News Flash
Open-source Mobile Automation Tools release updates:
- * Calabash-Android released a new version 0.9.8
Download link | Release notes - * Calabash-iOS released a new version 0.21.8
Download link | Release notes - * Appium released a new version 1.10.0
Download link | Release notes
Mobile OS release updates:
- * Apple released a new iOS version 12.1.3 beta 4 (build 16D5039a)
Download link | Release notes* iOS version 12.1.3 links are accessible using an Apple Developer account only - * Google released a new version Android 9 Pie (API level 28)
Download link | Release notes
Mobile OS SDK release updates:
- * Apple released a new Xcode 10.1 (build 10B61)
Download link | Release notes* iOS version 10.1 links are accessible using an Apple Developer account only - * Google released a new Android Studio version 3.3
Download link | Release notes
Have Suggestions?
We would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments and suggestions. This will help us to make us better and more useful next time.
Share your thoughts and ideas at knowledgecenter@qasource.com