Stop creating barriers: The uncoolness of locking mobile orientation and font size.
When I first got a touch screen smartphone, one of the things I enjoyed the most was turning it around, from portrait to landscape, landscape to portrait. For about a month, I experimented with doing everything on my smartphone to see if I could get away with not using a laptop at all. Being able to change orientation helped a lot.
I love writing. Ideas can flow in times and places nowhere near or practical for a laptop. The portability of mobile phones allows writing these ideas down while commuting or waiting in a queue. By holding the device in landscape, I can use both thumbs to type while still having a firm grip. I also found that this is the best position to complete forms, take notes, look at maps, or video conferencing.
While apps locked in portrait orientation are an annoyance for people like me, it is a real barrier for many others. A person with low vision will have the default font size set to the largest. In landscape, they will be able to read more comfortably and without having to scroll horizontally all the time. There are also people with restricted mobility who will have their smartphones permanently mounted on the arm of a wheelchair or holding stick. Let’s not forget those who avoid having apps on their phones and prefer them on tablets. Why would they do that? Well, does it matter? That’s pretty much their business.
Mobile apps, by default, work on either portrait or landscape orientation. Locking them in one position is a classic example of creating a barrier that excludes many people from using your app.
That brings me to another barrier increasingly seen on apps: locked text size or the lack of support for dynamic text size. Another beauty of smartphones (and almost every other electronic consumer communication device) is the ability to customise their settings to our individual preferences and needs.
Things like having the choice of which font size and style to view on your screen (regardless of those chosen by a web or app designer), being able to change brightness and contrast, or deciding on frequency of notifications, are just a few out of many factory-shipped accessibility settings. For someone to purposedly take away any of those choices from customers, is akin to the person who intentionally jams the hood of a cool convertible, just because they don’t like the wind messing up with their hair. That’s not cool!
The spending power of disabled people in the UK, also known as the Purple Power, is about £275bn. Digital Accessibility is not a cost. It is an investment. By building so many barriers, app developers are also excluding themselves from tapping this market. And why? What happened to ambition?
Digital Accessibility is native to mobile devices and operating systems. Embracing it, instead of creating barriers, sets you apart from the competition. It is far more rewarding to maximise the number of users enjoying using an app, than closing the doors to any group of people.
