According to W3C “Mobile accessibility” refers to making websites and applications more accessible to people with disabilities when they are using mobile phones and other devices. WAI’s work in this area addresses accessibility issues of people using a broad range of devices to interact with the web: phones, tablets, TVs, and more.
Accessibility testing on mobile devices can be made easy with the following tools, while automation catches 40% of the bugs we always need to perform manual accessibility audits to make sure that applications are universally designed.
- Accessibility Inspector in Xcode
- Talk Back for Android
- VoiceOver for iOS
- android Accessibility Test Kit
- Debugging Firefox for Android over USB
- Remote Debugging on Android with Chrome
Apple provides the Accessibility Inspector testing tool that can be launched by choosing Xcode > Open Developer Tool > Accessibility Inspector in the menu bar or Dock. You can download Xcode from the Mac App Store for free. The Accessibility Inspector presents a utility window that displays the information properties (and values), action methods, and position in the accessibility hierarchy of the object currently under the mouse pointer.
Video Tutorial on using the Accessibility Inspector in Xcode
TalkBack is an Accessibility Service that helps blind and vision-impaired users interact with their devices.
Talkback adds spoken, audible, and vibration feedback to your device. It is a system application that was pre-installed on most devices and is updated when the accessibility service is improved.
VoiceOver is a gesture-based screen reader that lets you enjoy the fun and simplicity of iOS even if you can’t see the screen. With VoiceOver enabled, just triple-click the Home button to access it wherever you are in iOS. Hear a description of everything happening on your screen, from battery level to who’s calling to which app your finger’s on. You can adjust the speaking rate and pitch to suit you.
The AccessibilityChecks class allows you to use your existing test code to test for accessibility issues. As a View is acted upon in tests, checks from the accessibility test framework will be run automatically before proceeding. Simply import the class and add the following line of code to your setup methods annotated with @Before:(Use the above links to get more info)
It’s been possible for a long time to connect the Firefox Developer Tools to Firefox for Android so you can debug your mobile website. Until now, this
was a fairly complex and error-prone process. From Firefox 36 we’ve made the process much simpler: in particular, you don’t need to deal directly with
theadb
tool at all. Now you connect using
WebIDE, which takes care of setting up adb behind the scenes. For this to work, you need at least Firefox 36 on the desktop and Firefox 35 on the mobile device.
Remote debug live content on an Android device from your Windows, Mac, or Linux computer.
•Set up your Android device for remote debugging, and discover it from your development machine.
•Inspect and debug live content on your Android device from your development machine.
•Screencast content from your Android device into DevTools.
There are a number of bookmark lets/favelets that also help test for accessibility bugs on responsive design, so please check out our collection of “Bookmarklets for accessibility testing” & also feel free to share any more tools/resources that can be added to the list.