Accessibility affects revenue, retention and how people experience your product in real life. This guide outlines a practical, engineer-led approach to improving accessibility in an existing mobile app, starting with an internal audit and ending with real user testing and certified compliance.
Why Accessibility Matters for Mobile Apps
Accessibility directly affects revenue and retention. No one wants to lose subscription revenue because a percentage of users cannot get through the app’s paywall.
Beyond that, most of us have experienced moments when using a phone suddenly becomes difficult. Holding a baby in one arm. Carrying groceries. Navigating the app with one hand. When an app is difficult to use in those moments, people simply stop using it.
Whether your motivation is empathy or revenue, the goal is the same: Improving the accessibility of your product.
This guide is written by engineers, for engineers. We believe in strong product ownership. That means being involved beyond implementation and stepping into testing and design conversations to keep the team aligned. Our QA and design partners are essential here. Accessibility only works when everyone understands their responsibility in building a great product.
A Warning on “Magic” Fixes
Before diving in, a quick reality check: you’ve likely seen accessibility overlays marketed as an easy fix. These tools promise instant compliance through a simple subscription.
They don’t work. In many cases, they actively make the product worse. There’s no SDK or add-on you can ship alongside your app to fix accessibility. Using these tools wastes money, time and user trust.
Real accessibility requires intentional work. So how do you approach it properly?
The Strategy
We tackle accessibility in a way that is both time- and cost-effective:
- Internal audit and testing: While opinions vary on when to involve users with disabilities, we suggest starting with an accessibility review.
- Testing with users with disabilities: Real-world testing is critical. Observing how people with different needs interact with your app reveals friction points that checklists alone won’t catch.
- Certified audit: We strongly recommend a certified audit. For product owners, particularly those doing business in the US, failing accessibility standards can lead to costly lawsuits.
How Do You Run an Accessibility Audit?
If you are starting internally, structure the process carefully.
- Identify issues in one flow or screen: Don’t try to fix the entire app at once. Start with a single flow. When you find an issue there, it often exists elsewhere. You can use a WCAG checklist as a guide. External audits are conducted against these rules, most often the WCAG AA standards, which are also the benchmark for the European Accessibility Act (EAA). Understanding these rules early makes the final audit far smoother.
- Evaluate the rest of the app: Are you facing the same challenges on other screens? Look for patterns. Identifying these trends allows your team to build repeatable solutions instead of one-off fixes.
- Fix the design and UX: Accessibility starts with structure. Layout, hierarchy and interaction patterns matter before a single line of code is written.
- Implement the fix in code: Engineers then translate the updated design into a correct, accessible implementation.
- Iterate: Apply what you learn to the rest of the app. Each pass gets faster and more predictable.
It’s vital for designers, engineers and QA to have a shared understanding of these goals. It saves time, prevents friction and ensures accessibility is never an afterthought.
3 Key Principles of Accessible App Design
- Cleaner is better: Maintain a high information-to-communication ratio.
- Clarity is the goal: Accessibility is simply about making an app easy to use and understand for everyone.
- Do not skip real user testing: It’s easy to view testing with users with disabilities as optional. But it isn’t. There is no substitute for feedback from people with specific needs. If you want to actually improve the app, not just pass an audit, you need this perspective.
Why This Pays Off
Accessibility is an integral part of any feature. Improving it isn't a bonus; it's an overall improvement of the product. Better accessibility leads to better UX. Better UX means users can engage with your app more effectively and more often. When your app is easier to use, users stay longer and come back more often.
It really is that simple.
