Looking for tools or apps that check accessibility of iOS apps

By Rafal, 4 November, 2021

Forum
iOS and iPadOS

Dear,
I check accessibility from time to time, so I'D like to ask you if you can recomend tools that test accessibility of iOS apps for blind and low vision users. Please recomend me these
ools no matter if they are paic or not.
Thank you for your assistance.
Greetings, Ralf

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Comments

By Bruce Harrell on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 03:34

I use time and fingers. Are you looking for an app that will check accessibility for many apps all at once?

By Rafal on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 03:34

Any of these options are ok. I'd like to check accessibility of apps and get feetback. I'm looking for an inspector in xcode or any other tool that can inspect elements and to observe the process and accessibility DOM.

By John Hope on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 03:34

Possibly Apple has such a tool, but I've yet to hear of one being available to the general public.

Not surprising really when you consider the scope of what would need to be checked. Even if you limit the scope of accessibility testing to blind and low vision users, that's a whole load of VoiceOver, braille, and low vision features and functionality to test. There's also the question of qualifying what is considered to be accessible.

At best, I think that an automated tool could only offer a heavily qualified indication of an app's accessibility.

I would be interested in hearing more on this though, particularly if I am way off target with my assumptions of what's possible with automated tools of this type.

By Survivor Wolf on Thursday, November 25, 2021 - 03:34

You can tools to check for accessibility on the web and on Android. Of course nothing will replace manual testing, but these tools can check for elements having labels, color contrast, touch target size, potential focus traps and so forth.

However, iOS is much more restrictive when it comes to what apps can access in the operating system and so it is more difficult to do this kind of code inspection. You need a tool like Continuum by level access and it has to be hooked into an app that you are building via an automation framework.

So I'm afraid if you want to inspect third party apps, you're out of luck at the moment. If you want this for an app you are creating, look into Continuum or Axe by deque.