Appt News (Accessible Mobile Apps) - Issue #75
Hey y'all,
In this edition, we have a special guest bringing you the latest in accessibility news! Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats is an iOS engineer and native accessibility expert. You may know him from his blog or his book "Developing Accessible iOS Apps: Support VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, and More" or even from his conference talks about accessibility. Without further ado, let's get to the the news from Dani!
News by Daniel Devesa Derksen-Staats
SwiftLeeds happened a few weeks ago, and as always, it was a great conference! I wanted to share a couple of highlights from this year.
First, something amazing: people often ask me who to follow to learn more about accessibility, and it turned out that many of them were all there at once. I couldn’t resist getting a photo with them. Here it is, along with their Mastodon handles. And a bonus: it’s a great example of good alt text by Bas:
Second, I ran accessibility drop-in sessions with my good friend Rob. It’s always great to hear what the community is thinking (and struggling with) when it comes to accessibility.
A few takeaways:
- Awareness is still the biggest hurdle. Interestingly, people who say their app’s accessibility is “bad” are often too harsh on themselves and they usually mean “we’d like it to be better”. They care, they’re learning, and their apps are usually way better than average.
- Some developers think their apps must not be accessible because they haven’t done much active work to improve them. However, and despite the common wisdom that accessibility means lots of extra work, sometimes less is more. I first heard the word accessibility years ago while working as the sole mobile dev at a tiny startup. To save time, I stuck to native components and avoided unnecessary customisation. One day, we got an App Store review thanking us for making the app accessible. I said to my team, “What’s accessible?” followed by, “I haven’t done anything!” Turns out I had, by keeping things simple.
- We’re still preaching to the choir. How do we get others to care as much as we do?
Accessibility is still driven bottom-up. Championed by amazing mobile devs within organisations. Keep up the great work! It is really not easy when you find friction in your company. The European Accessibility Act seems to have given us a bit more breathing room to do our job, but for many companies, it seems the main goal is still to avoid legal action, and we know that’s not what accessibility is about.
Thanks to everyone working to make apps more accessible and inclusive.
For iOS Devs...
Learnable, Memorable, Accessible
I’ve told you before that using native components is one of the best ways to keep your apps accessible. But sometimes you need to build custom components… maybe the available options aren’t flexible enough to express your brand, or you want to add functionality that isn’t supported out of the box, etc. When that happens, Jordan Morgan rightly suggests making them learnable, memorable, and of course… accessible!
Jordan Morgan
Improved Accessibility
Another great outcome from our drop-in sessions at SwiftLeeds! Daniel Saidi stopped by to chat about how to make KeyboardKit more accessible. Who hasn’t always wanted to use the keyboardKey accessibility trait? I definitely have! So if, like us, you enjoy geeking out over the most obscure accessibility APIs and features, you’ll love this one.
danielsaidi
Touch-free Touch Screens | iOSKonf25 | Rob Whitaker
Sometimes you see a talk and think, “I wish I’d come up with that idea!” This one, by Rob Whitaker, is exactly that. I often say that accessibility is about abstracting the user interface so people can use apps and consume information through multiple input and output mechanisms. Rob takes that idea to the next level, showing all the ways you can let users interact with apps without even touching the screen. It’s also a great example of how to fix the “preaching to the choir” problem: a fun talk that, on the surface, doesn't look like it is about accessibility, but gets people genuinely interested in it.
Robin Kanatzar, App Accessibility Speaker and Developer
Our very own Robin Kanatzar keeps doing an amazing job advocating for accessibility and spreading the love for it. If you listen to the full episode, you’ll hear the moment she met with the host again (some time after recording the episode) to share her thoughts on the elephant in the room: accessibility and Liquid Glass.
Swift Connection 2025 - Ben Freiband - What People Get Wrong with Accessibility
And if you didn’t believe me earlier when I said that sometimes less is more when it comes to developing accessible iOS apps, don’t just take my word for it. Ben Freiband gave a whole talk on exactly that at Swift Connection this year.
For Android Devs...
It is DroidCon season! Here are some of the accessibility sessions that have happened in the conference editions in Berlin and Bangladesh
It's All About Focus - and Accessibility - Eeva-Jonna Panula | droidcon Berlin 2025:
In this talk Eeva-Jonna explores how focus management and navigation order underpin accessibility on Android. She walks through examples of how changing focus behaviour can impact assistive technology users.
Navigating the Roadblocks to European Accessibility Act - Maxim Malisciuc | droidcon Berlin 2025
Maxim takes us through the practical challenges of aligning Android apps with the European Accessibility Act (EAA). He covers regulation, pitfalls in accessibility services usage and what Android developers should watch out for.
Building Inclusive and Accessible Android Apps - Sashoto Seeam
Sashoto offers a developer-centric walkthrough of building Android apps with accessibility baked in: design choices, technical implementation and inclusive automation strategies.
What’s New in Google Accessibility – Episode 10
Text Outline comes to the rescue, offering better contrast for text across apps. Keyboards can now be magnified too. And my favourite update: you can now deep link directly to Accessibility Settings!
That's all for today's edition! Hope you enjoyed it.
Big thank you to Dani for guest writing this month!
Feel free to send feedback and article suggestions for next month to hello@robinkanatzar.com, and follow Dani on Mastodon or LinkedIn or X.
Cheers,
Appt Foundation
The Appt® platform is an initiative of the Appt Foundation, a non-profit organisation. Our mission is to make apps accessible for everyone. We try to achieve this by sharing free content and open-source code.
You can download the free accessibility handbook here:
