BestApps – Best Practices in Accessible Applications

BestApps – Best Practices in Accessible Applications

The world of mobile apps has exploded over the past couple of years. Today, both Apple and Google claim to have more than one million apps for their respective phones and tout apps as one of the main reasons to use a phone. Developers from around the world are working on creating apps for the mobile platform. Smartphones, with their sensors and computing power, promise to be a great assistive device for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, many of these millions of apps do not take into account accessibility.

The goal of BestApps is to make it straightforward to create applications that are universally designed and accessible with a minimum of work for developers. BestApps will involve developers and users to help determine a set of best practice guidelines for designers and developers. These guidelines will serve as a complement to the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) with a specific focus on mobile applications. The findings will be shared among developers and designers, part of demonstration applications, and incorporated into the Qt library, a crossplatform, application development framework that is licensed under a commercial and an open source license and used by 500,000 developers around the world.

Goals

The main goal of BestApps is to make it straightforward and easy to create universally designed mobile applications.
To achieve this goal, the project has several sub-goals:
  • Determine best practices for developing accessible mobile applications.
  • Create a demonstration application that showcases best practices for accessibility.
  • Find out how end-users interact with Qt applications and AT.
  • Determine how new development technologies affect accessibility (animation, etc.).
  • Incorporate findings into Qt.
  • Disseminate results to other developers.

Latest project news

One of the goals of the BestApps project was to document best practices for creating accessible mobile applications. We have documented them in a report, Best Practices for Creating Accessible Mobile Applicationsavaliable for download from NR. The report is primarily targetted at developers and designers and provides a list of best practices for creating accessible applications and tries to give some reasoning behind these practices.

Updated date: Thursday, February 5, 2015 - 13:16
Updated date: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - 14:03

Publications

No publication yet.

Project period

May–December 2014
Department

Objectives

The main goal of BestApps is to make it straightforward and easy to create universally designed mobile applications.

Financing

Deltasenteret’s Tilskudd til arbeid med universell utforming i 2014 with support from Digia Norway and NR.

Partners