Accessibility has long been a subject of discussion in the tech world. Apple is currently leading the industry by a long stretch. The truth is in this era where technology is the key advantage that spells out profit against your competitors, an application downtime can put your business to a full stop. When your interface does not provide the accessible navigation, you fail to provide the part of your service you want your customers to reach. When you develop a product that excludes usability for the impaired, you are limiting your customers.
This is the reason why tech giants like Google and Apple are ahead of the game. It is precisely the fact that they motivate their workers in the form of guidelines to think of user functionality, providing easy accessibility for their gadgets and applications to be used properly and smoothly. Developers from these big companies are trained to make features accessible. However, while Apple and Google are already ahead – there is still more to making applications accessible that everyone can perform on their end.
Application accessibility testing is one principle tech companies and app developers can employ to ensure that their product can be used by everyone. Quality assurance on the user interface, labeling and functionality of a certain gadget or application can be tinkered in order to find out if it allows high quality user experience. For the moment, companies only enforce testing and limit apps which present objectionable content. If an accessibility rating system is available, accessibility will surely be one of the factors to be considered when developing applications.
Because of these, developers do not get the situation in front of them. People tend to buy things that can provide more convenience but since applications are not marked down for their accessibility features, developers do not get feedback regarding problems on accessibility, usability or interface. Companies tend to rush to get apps and updates to be released into the market and accessibility can be overlooked.
The problem with this is the fact that one’s ability to use the application is greatly impacted by undermining accessibility. Such features after all can be easily fixed by developers as they can either be a text custom control or image buttons – these bugs can actually be fixed in half an hour to an hour max as an example. One solution to this is quality testing for accessibility.
Aside from testing, application stores can have basic checks, possibly specific questions, to be aware of the requirements for accessibility. Those that passed can have small badges that they passed accessibility testing in order to help users choose better applications.
Still, at the end of the day – what would work most is an efficient system to keep accessibility a priority for everyone.
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