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

Options

Comments

By Travis Roth on Sunday, June 21, 2015 - 23:01

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 Sunday, June 21, 2015 - 23:01

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.