I have traditionally said that good design is also design for accessibility. And there are many cases where mobiles are used by anyone in an environment where some input our output may be obscured, so every design should assume accessibility.

When Eric and I originally conceived of the outline for this book, I think we both had this same concept in mind. That good design covers it. But especially for apps of late, with the rise of hybrid development, and with new needs for touch accessibility, this is not true. Here in late 2012, on the devices that support full spoken-guidance accessibility, a lot of apps are marginal to useless for the low-vision population, and almost all could use improvement.

Semantic Presentation

You have, I hope, heard of the term semantic markup. It's a Web term that's been around a long time, and is rooted in all sorts of goodness.

First: Always do that. But you might say "I build apps. What's that got to do with me?" Well, everything displayed as part of a software product is an element that is rendered onto the display. These all have their own structure, organization and tagging. And for mobile apps, these work in a way very similar to a Website. You can

I want to come up with a phrase like the old semantic-web was for, well, the Web. To emphasize the natural-goodness of well-designed code. If you use the right component, label it well, and arrange it properly, it's almost automatically an accessible app. If not... well, you aren't doing anyone any favors.

This article seems pretty comprehensive, and narrows to a series of steps. Try it out.

I'll eventually put some effort into specific guidelines, or at least a series of links. Here's some to start with:

Shay Howe had a GREAT presentation on semantics and html 5 at the 2012 Float Mobile eLearning Symposium. When the video comes out, at least, find and watch that.

More notes from recent work and pondering: Accessibility modes for non-sighted users are VERY different interfaces and interactions. Try it, and see what I mean. Labels and types of interfaces matter.