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From: Jennison Mark Asuncion
Date: Fri, Mar 25 2011 12:24PM
Subject: international accessibility standards for mobile app development
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Hello,

A question was asked of me - is there a set of internationally recognized
accessibility standards or guidelines that explicitly address mobile app
development (i.e., something like WCAG specifically for developing
accessible mobile apps)?

If these do not exist, for those of you who have developed your own
internal requirements for accessible mobile app development, what
standard(s) have these been built to meet?



Jennison



--
Jennison Mark Asuncion
Co-Director, Adaptech Research Network <www.adaptech.org>
LinkedIn at <www.linkedin.com/in/jennison>

From: Jared Smith
Date: Fri, Mar 25 2011 12:51PM
Subject: Re: international accessibility standards for mobile app development
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There is the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 -
http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/ But this is primarily for mobile web
content, not for native web apps - though there's much here that is
relevant.

Google just released a best practices document for Android -
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/design/accessibility.html
The iPhone developer documentation also thoroughly documents
accessible application development.

Because the mobile app platforms are so different, I don't think there
is any international set of guidelines or standards available - and if
there were, I wonder how useful it would be across all platforms.

Jared

From: John E Brandt
Date: Fri, Mar 25 2011 1:21PM
Subject: Re: international accessibility standards for mobile app development
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Great question. And an interesting observation from Jared.

I am literally right in the middle of pulling together a list of lists of
"apps for assistive technology" and have been struggling with this exact
issue. I've taken a closer look at a number of the apps that have been
listed by various sources and I have even downloaded and "tested" a number
of the free ones. My first observation of many of them were that they were
basically junk. Many of them getting "one star" in the App Store reviews and
lots of complaints. I can't understand how anyone would have put them on a
"recommended" list. This then led me to Jennison's question about any
standards. For example, does the app work with the native VoiceOver screen
reader in the iOS?

To be fair, there are some apps which are beautifully designed specifically
as AT - particularly some of the Augmentative and alternative communication
(AAC ) devices.

I'll post the link to the list of lists when it is done. I can assure you
there are lots of disclaimers on the page.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA

From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Fri, Mar 25 2011 1:39PM
Subject: Re: international accessibility standards for mobile app development
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I would also like to see some standards in this arena, at least
defining what "accessibility" means. Right now, accessibility on
mobile devices seems to mean "text-to-speech", and general
navigability by people with vision disabilities. I find this
bizarre, because accessibility and the web arena has for years
included people with other disabilities.

I mean, more power to the designers who are putting a lot of
emphasis on VoiceOver and other such tools, but I'm tired of
seeing press releases that say that such and such a device is
"accessible". It's accessible to one population of people with
disabilities,, but there are others.

-Deborah

From: John Foliot
Date: Fri, Mar 25 2011 6:00PM
Subject: Re: international accessibility standards for mobile app development
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Jared Smith wrote:
>
> There is the W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 -
> http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/ But this is primarily for mobile web
> content, not for native web apps - though there's much here that is
> relevant.

Yup, further to that is this other W3C Note:
"Relationship between Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) and Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)" http://www.w3.org/TR/mwbp-wcag/

JF