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

• 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.