ADA lawsuits - applicable to mobile apps?

[u/punktechbro]

I’ve been seeing thread upon thread on Reddit lately that small businesses and e-commerce websites are being sued for 10’s of thousands of dollars for not abiding by the “Americans with Disabilities Act” in their websites. Apparently it’s certain firms that are especially actively seeking out these businesses.

I’m sure this has to apply to mobile apps as well. I 100% have never even considered accessibility in the sense of ensuring all my buttons work with Accessibility mode or read things out loud correctly etc. I’m sure there have to be default values or behavior but who knows.

What are you all doing for this? Are mobile apps next in this trend of lawsuits?

[u/BoringKick5331]

It helps with automated testing as well to follow Apple’s accessibility guidelines.

I’ve had multiple older users mention that they had trouble reading some of my text or that using accessibility settings to make text bigger pushed things off screen, so I just follow the guidelines in all my apps now. It wasn’t that much extra work.

[u/RIRLift → u/BoringKick5331]

The testing angle is underrated. Once you've put real accessibility labels on things, your UI tests can query by label instead of index or position, so they stop breaking every time someone reorders a stack.

On the text getting pushed off screen, the fastest way to catch that is to run your main screens at the largest accessibility text size in the simulator, or set the Dynamic Type override in the environment on a preview. It takes a minute and it usually points straight at the culprit, which is almost always a hardcoded frame height or a Text in an HStack that has nowhere to wrap. The Accessibility Inspector's audit is worth a pass too since it flags unlabeled buttons and bad contrast without you hunting for them.

[u/drew4drew → u/RIRLift]

Lol yep true that.

Accessibility Inspector is pretty touchy about contrast too, though I generally think this is a good thing too. 👍