The most accessible app on the App Store
Secret intention:
Make Intro the most accessible app on the App Store.
Hidden agenda:
Make Intro awesome for everyone. Try to spawn a wave of developers that make their own apps even more accessible, out of their sheer competitive enthusiasm. Which would then be a win, whether I win or lose.
Dastardly plan:
Make enhancing accessibility a continuous development objective. Build on the accessibility efforts I've already made as Intro was built, by shipping a significant accessibility improvement to Intro every month. Begin with the obvious. Start with auditing and improving the current support for VoiceOver. Implement captioning and audio descriptions into the Learn tutorial video, and any subsequent videos created in Intro. Implement support for dynamic text and larger text sizes, with the associated interface redesign that will be required in some parts of Intro. Along the way, collect and integrate end user feedback from a diverse range of users of accessibility features. Engage with other app developers and influencers to raise and focus on the issue of app accessibility. Examine and discuss app accessibility guidelines to broaden the ways in which Intro can be made accessible. Then go beyond all of this, targeting cognitive accessibility. Examine implementing settings within Intro to enable local decisions for each app installation regarding the cognitive complexity that will be presented to the user. Take heed in this of the global work currently going on to develop cognitive accessibility standards, and contribute to that work.
Secrecy procedure:
Document each step of this accessibility journey at intro.app/blog, to ensure that it remains tightly under wraps and that there is no chance that it could assist other developers to improve the accessibility of their own products.
Nefarious timeframe:
t-minus one year, and counting. A continuous process never ends, but as a start I'm giving myself one year to make some great enhancements to enhance Intro's accessibility.
Engage:
Join the conversation on Twitter: @greatintro & developer @dbabbage #GAAD. And if you're a developer taking up this challenge, ping me so I can let you know about The #AppA11y Pledge (coming soon). DMs are open.
Post-script:
I have been thinking through how best to share this plan since I launched Intro in February 2018. Once Intro 1.2.1 was complete, I started writing this manifesto, and while I was doing that Global Accessibility Awareness Day appeared on my radar. I still planned to publish this sometime in the last week, when this post-script would have said, 'I didn't hold back the publication of this until Global Accessibility Awareness Day because every day is a good day to focus on accessibility.' But things take time, and here we are, and being ahead as we are, in New Zealand it's now Global Accessibility Awareness Day. And you know, it feels good to be part of the #GAAD global party.