Not only language stops people from communicating with each other. This blog post will cover what we do when it comes to mobile app accessibility, and why it’s important.
2024-08-06
Blog
The vision of Care to Translate is to enable safe communication between patients and healthcare providers, no matter what language they speak. Although we focus on language barriers, there are other barriers that are taken into consideration when building our app.
It's not only language that stops people from being able to communicate with each other. The world consists of all types of people, with a wide range of unique needs. So let's do a deep dive into what we do when it comes to mobile app accessibility, and why it’s important.
You might have heard about the WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), a recommendation framework developed by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), focusing on how to build a more accessible web for everyone.
The recommendations focus on how to build applications that are accessible for a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning and neurological disabilities. By following these guidelines, you not only build an accessible app for people with disabilities, but you also make sure that the app will be easier to use for all users. Also worth remembering is that not all disabilities are permanent. Anyone can become temporarily disabled, and by designing inclusively we support all needs.
In later years, the WCAG recommendations have been used as a foundation for developing both standards, such as the European Accessibility Requirements for ICT products and services, and for defining new laws, focusing on inclusivity and the right for everyone to use digital tools.
Although these requirements are still at an early stage, it’s a clear indication that we are moving towards a higher level of accessibility across all digital platforms.
At Care to Translate we have been thinking about accessible app design from an early stage. When we first started working with accessibility design, WCAG was not yet covering how to work with native apps. But they have still influenced our user experience choices, covering a wide range of perspectives inspired by the WCAG principles.
It’s impossible to cover all aspects that we work on in a blog post, but to give you an idea of what this entails, here are some of the things we are doing:
When choosing colors, we always make sure the contrast ratio is strong enough for text to be easily read. This also includes making sure that our color profile works with different color blindness settings.
We regularly test and improve the experience of using our app with Talkback (an accessibility service for Android that helps blind and visually impaired users interact with their devices), making sure that blind users can navigate easily.
We make sure the app can scale, both with internal font size scaling, and by making sure the app is usable with scaled UI.
We structure our content in a logical order, guiding the users in finding what they are looking for.
We provide our translations in both text, audio and image, making sure everyone can understand them.
For us accessibility is not a list of requirements, but rather a necessity in our journey towards making health care accessible for everyone, something that inspired us to build our product from the beginning.
Language barriers should not stop anyone from getting the health care they deserve, and no disabilities should stop you from overcoming language barriers using our app.
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