Accessibility in Flutter
Learn to make your Flutter application more accessible.
Accessibility refers to the practice of making our applications usable by as many people as possible. We traditionally think of accessibility as being about people with disabilities. However, the practice of making applications accessible also benefits other groups, such as people who speak different languages, read from right to left, have slow network connections, or have minor impairments.
We probably don’t want to exclude people of certain abilities, circumstances, or cultures from accessing or effectively using our application.
In this lesson, we will learn to make our application more accessible to different user groups, regardless of their abilities or circumstances.
we’ll achieve this by:
- Learning the different forms of disability
- Scanning our application to discover accessibility issues
- Labeling our application’s semantics
- Making our application neurodiversity accessible
Forms of disabilities
People with disabilities are just as diverse as people without disabilities, and so are their abilities. There are four major categories of disabilities, namely:
- Motor disability, which affects motion
- Vision disability, which affects seeing
- Neurodiversity disability, which affects perception and concentration
- Hearing disability
The table below shows the different types of disabilities, the challenges people might face while using our application, and how we can help them by making our applications more accessible.
Disability | Challenges | How to Help |
Motor | Require large click/touch targets Require special hardware Require voice-activated software | Have different difficulty levels in games Enable keyboard navigation Enable voice navigation Use adaptive UI components Enable text autocompletion |
Vision | Blindness Severe visual impairment Moderate visual impairment Mild vision impairment Colorblindness | Use large font sizes Screen readers High contrast content Use both color and icons to convey messages Add options to change colors in your application |
Neurodiversity | Focussing problems Learning difficulties Autism Dyslexia ADHD | Use minimal design Voice narrations and subtitles Enable spell-checking, autocorrection, and sentence capitalization Offer the ability to remember settings and passwords Guide the user with hints (without overwhelming them) |
Hearing | High hearing threshold by air or bone conduction Failure to repeat words in a word recognition test | Closed captioning Including visual signals in games Vibration on notifications |
Run the application below to test the implementation of available accessibility features.
import 'package:flutter/material.dart';
import 'home_page.dart';
void main() {
runApp(const MyApp());
}
class MyApp extends StatelessWidget {
const MyApp({Key? key}) : super(key: key);
@override
Widget build(BuildContext context) {
return MaterialApp(
title: 'Accessibility Demo',
theme: ThemeData(primarySwatch: Colors.blue, useMaterial3: false),
home: const HomePage(),
debugShowCheckedModeBanner: false,
);
}
}
Scanning our application with Accessibility Scanner
To discover accessibility issues in our application, run the application in an Android emulator or physical device and use the Accessibility Scanner ...