Introduction

  • 10 minutes

It can be difficult to make your Windows apps inclusive. By inclusive we mean accessible - even friendly - to users with an impairment that makes using a highly visual mouse-driven app a challenge in itself.

The range of accessibility concerns can be a little daunting. The most common are visual impairments - including poor or aging vision, difficulty in focusing on a close-up computer screen, degrees of color-blindness, and a partial or complete blindness. Other impairments include partial or complete deafness, motor deficiencies, learning difficulties, and forms of physical and mental illness that might hinder a user's success with an app.

In this module, we'll focus on identifying inclusivity issues with a Windows app, and making modifications to create a more inclusive visual experience that supports alternative user inputs. We won't be covering speech-based inclusive experiences here.

Developing an inclusive app

When developing an inclusive app, there are three basic strategies you could follow:

  1. Build inclusive features into the architecture of the app.
  2. Be aware of inclusive features. Develop the app first, and then focus on adding inclusivity.
  3. Build the app regardless of inclusivity and then add inclusive features after the app is otherwise complete.

Realistically, most apps will fall into category 3, though through this module we'd hope to encourage you to move your development strategy to category 2. Although some inclusive features come for free, some require a little effort to support and others require a fair volume of work. Because of this, getting an app's UI up and running first might be the best option for many app developers. Here, we'll show you what to include and what to avoid, and how to move forward to add more inclusivity support to your app.

Summary

Completing this module will provide you with coding knowledge to support visually and motor skill impaired users, and design advice to support this knowledge. We won't be handling audio features - screen readers and voice input - in this module.

To start with, we'll need an app that isn't inclusive. We'll use a project that builds a scientific calculator as our starting point.