Welcome to our series on the ICT Symposium’s Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing. For the next couple of months we will be posting a couple of times a week! We will be posting a series of articles to help testers and developers determine and improve the accessibility of their mobile websites and apps. All this information is already online in Word format, so if you can’t wait check out our page on Mobile testing. Our previous article was Mobile Site Accessibility Testing, Step 2: Identify site type and variations – Day Three, or check out our page with links to all the published Mobile Site and Native App Methodology articles.
Step 2: Define application functionality
Through your understanding of the purpose of the native mobile application, define which functionality is critical to its purpose and use and that must be tested for efficacy, operability and workflow from a user experience perspective.
Ask the question
How would the experience be impacted if the functionality failed, the content could not be reached and/or the experience caused a barrier to the user?
Prioritize
All functionality should be accessible within the native application; however, it is important to define and include the critical functionality for each individual app to be prioritized in your testing.
Common elements that must always be tested
These are some common elements in native apps that will require testing if they’re present:
- Navigation (menus, header, footer)
- Landing page
- Emergency alert pages
- Login pages
- Settings
- Account and profile
- Contact Us
- Real-time updates (e.g. eBay, Uber)
- Privacy policy, Terms & Conditions
- Interactional / transactional (select product, add to cart, payment, live chat, help, Q&A)
- Widgets (calendars, date pickers)
- Third-party integrations (geo-locational maps, chat, etc.)
- High-traffic areas
Up next
Up next for Mobile Site and Native App Accessibility Testing is Step 3: Test critical issues.
Contributors
This document was developed by the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium Mobile Sub-Committee. Members include: Gian Wild (Co-Chair), Peter McNally (Co-Chair), Brent Davis, Corbb O’Connor, Karen Herr, Kathryn Weber-Hottleman, Kathy Eng, Laura Renfro, Megha Rajopadhye, Mona Rekhi, Morgan Lee Kestner, Rafal Charlampowicz, Ryan Pugh, Steve Sawczyn, Sunish Gupta, Tom Lawton and Chris Law This document was developed by the ICT Accessibility Testing Symposium Native App Sub-Committee. Members include: Gian Wild (Co-Chair), Jennifer Chadwick (Co-Chair), Kathy Eng, Ryan Pugh, Kathryn Weber-Hottleman, Brent Davis, Laura Renfro, Peter McNally, Karen Herr, Steve Sawczyn, Sunish Gupta, Tom Lawton, Sam Bouchat, Rafal Charlampowicz, Damon Wandke, Morgan Lee Kester, Mona Rekhi, Corbb O’Connor and Chris Law.