I take accessibility very seriously, so I’m really glad that new guidance on accessibility on Android has been made available to developers.
One of the problems with designing accessible applications is that it’s very easy to overlook the needs of users when you don’t share those needs. This is compounded when users have diverse needs which is the case when considering accessibility; the blind or partially sighted have completely different needs from the deaf or those who are hard of hearing.
It also doesn’t help when you make mistakes like this (from my Metaglow app). This all looks okay on the surface (but not especially great): simple layout, Dpad navigable, labelled buttons.
Until I considered the implications of my general design for this activity:
Which I belatedly realized leaves no way of navigating to the tabs at the bottom of the screen, except by touch: with focus falling naturally on the first element in the grid, the user can never move down far enough to reach the tabs because the list of favorites is effectively infinite for UI purposes.
Fixing that mistake involves too much re-work for the first release, so I’ll have to stick with the misdesign for now. Here’s a tip: don’t combine heavily populated AdapterViews with bottom-tabbed activities.
