Apps Leave Low-Vision Users In The Dust

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Health app users with vision issues often have trouble seeing small writing and buttons on smartphone apps.

According to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Washington, the majority of apps do not make adjustments for users with vision problems. Many health apps are directed at the chronically ill such as diabetics and the obese – many of which, UW notes, have vision problems associated with their illnesses.

“We wanted to see if these health applications would be out-of-the-box accessible, and most really weren’t,” said lead author Lauren Milne, a UW computer science and engineering doctoral student at the University of Washington. “They made a lot of amateur mistakes that people make when they build apps.”

Fierce Mobile Healthcare reports one problem they noticed were button labels that were not programmed correctly to integrate with Apple's smartphone screen reader. Also, many apps featured confusing layouts that did not sync with smartphone features that read information to a user.

“It wouldn’t have been hard to make their apps accessible by making that a priority in the first place. They could have been heroes from the get-go,” said senior author Richard Ladner, a UW computer science professor who leads multiple projects to make technologies more broadly accessible.

According to researchers, making adjustments to the apps to make them more accessible to low-vision users would be relatively easy.

“If people just used the basic widgets and things that Apple provides, they’d have better results,” said Ladner. “But the number of app developers has increased, and most of them are thinking about trying to make things pretty. They’re not thinking about all the users.”