An open-source effort for mobile-specific accessibility guidelines filling gaps in today’s standards

Evinced, the leading software company powering accessible web and mobile development, announced its first draft of Mobile Content Accessibility Guidelines (MCAG) in order to accelerate development of a national accessibility standard for mobile apps.

By 2025, 3.7 billion people – 72% of the global internet base – will access the internet exclusively via mobile. However, the guidelines in use for digital accessibility today – the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – came to be nearly 30 years ago, on May 5, 1999. While they were a major accomplishment in accessibility, they were created before smartphones, and the few major versions released since then remain largely web and desktop-oriented.

“At Evinced, we are deeply committed to furthering digital accessibility and inclusion. But the lack of truly mobile-specific accessibility guidelines has been a significant roadblock,” said Navin Thadani, Evinced CEO and Co-Founder. “To accelerate this, we invested many months of research, collaboration, and development to create this first draft of MCAG. With help from accessibility colleagues across the industry, we think there’s a real chance to extend this draft and possibly even fold it into WCAG someday, as a community effort that is overdue.”

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Why MCAG Is Needed

Prior to now, mobile app developers and accessibility reviewers have had to review mobile apps with respect to guidelines developed originally for desktop applications. While many of the principles in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are general enough to be “borrowed” in this way for mobile apps, and some recent additions to WCAG have related more to mobile apps, significant problems exist nonetheless.

One example of this is that many regulatory bodies have taken different approaches to the problem of what parts of WCAG don’t apply to mobile apps. This creates an international patchwork of guidelines that makes development harder.

Other examples come from the fact that desktop and mobile experiences are fundamentally different. Consider “touch targets”, the part of a screen that activates a function like a button.  For web software, these can be quite small, since users are typically using a mouse to interact with the screen and the accuracy is pinpoint.¹ By contrast, mobile app users typically rely on their fingers to interact with their phone screens. And as finger sizes vary broadly for a given user or among a set of users, touch targets need to be much larger. True mobile-specific accessibility guidelines would take this into account along with mobile accessibility principles from Google and Apple as well.

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