Accessibility on the Apple Watch: What's important to you?

By Ted Drake, 22 June, 2015

Forum
watchOS and Apple Watch Apps

Hi everyone
I've just finished my first accessibility review of a Watch app. It was for the Mint app and while everything worked as expected, I wanted to know if I was missing anything or prioritizing correctly.

As a user, what is most important for you? What are your biggest issues with Watch apps?

For instance, the biggest problem I found in this particular app was visual: color contrast and font resizing. There was also a list of items that were announced by VoiceOver as two bits of content instead of a single unit. For instance "$25" and "Coffee shops" instead of "$25 Coffee Shops".

I'd love to know if there's something in particular that you'd like product teams to review within their Watch apps.

thank you
Ted Drake, Intuit Accessibility

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Comments

By Travis Roth on Monday, June 22, 2015 - 04:15

I think you've caught the main ones at this point. I've not used many third party apps yet, and I thik more interesting ones will be once they can run natively.
You touched on it with the mention of reading by bits for VoiceOver. I have also seen apps where the order of info is not read in the most usable fashion. E.g., in a stock app I have it reads "+2 change 5%", "ticker symbol", "200.00". I dont' know if this is how its displayed visually or not, but flicking with VO it is a bit of a mind trick. Not unbearable but could be presented nicer.

By Ted Drake on Monday, June 22, 2015 - 04:15

Hi Travis
Thanks for the response. So far this seems to be the most common issue, I am investigating the best solutions to make this a better experience and will share it publicly.