Building Apps for Everyone

It is the moment you have been working so hard for. You press the ‘Submit’ button. Your app is now on its way to the App Store. In just a few days, your app is going to be available globally. But… is it really?

Any developer of an app with an aim of reaching a global audience needs to localise the app (most of us do that), but also to make it accessible! It is a team effort and everyone, from Developers to UX Designers or Product Managers, need to be involved, and therefore, to know its basics. In this talk we will try to provide a few techniques for improving those two areas of your apps from the points of view of the code, the use of tools we have available and the users’ expected experience.

A series of examples will be presented, showing how some of your users may perceive your app when localisation and accessibility are not correctly implemented or not implemented at all.

You would freak out if the ‘Back’ button was on the right side of the navigation bar, but that is what users that speak right-to-left written languages expect. If a modal view was presented without a ‘Close/Done’ button, you would consider it a bug, but it may exactly be what you are giving to blind users.

Smartphones, apps and the whole Apple ecosystem has helped us develop much more inclusive apps that anyone can use. But we can do better by building apps for everyone.