Accessibility Insights for Android is here

Today we are announcing the release of Accessibility Insights for Android, a new addition to our family of open source tools that help developers find and fix accessibility issues early in the development process. Adding support for mobile developers has been one of our biggest asks and we are pleased to be able to share the new tool, Accessibility Insights for Android, with our users.

A year ago we released Accessibility Insights for Web and Accessibility Insights for Windows as open source projects. We have been very pleased with the enthusiastic response from the community. We are hopeful that we can bring our passion for easy-to-use and productive developer accessibility tools into the world of mobile development.

Accessibility Insights for Android features automated checks that quickly test UI elements for some common accessibility issues, such as low contrast, missing names, or inadequate touch target sizes. Like all our products, we use open source rule sets and are committed to zero false positives. For this new product, we are continuing our collaboration with Deque Systems by using their axe-android rule set.

Since mobile developers write code on many platforms, we have built Accessibility Insights for Android as a cross-platform desktop application with versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can use it to test Android apps on a hardware device or on an Android Virtual Device. We designed and built our solution to work for developers in their environments, making it easy to use no matter where and how they work every day.

In Accessibility Insights for Android, the results are displayed with a screenshot of the app being tested. Each flagged accessibility issue is highlighted in the screenshot, as well as in a list with instructions on how to fix it. Details about each accessibility issue are shown in our new, more user-friendly, results UI that is also available in our web extension.

What you can do today

We are eager to share these tools with the community and have the community share with us. Here are three things you can do today:

1. Download the tools at accessibilityinsights.io.
2. Find our repos on GitHub:
   Accessibility Insights for Android and Web, Accessibility Insights for Windows, and Accessibility Insights for Android Service.
3. Contribute to help make the tools better for everyone.

If you have an idea for how these tools can be improved, please submit an issue or make a direct contribution to the code. We are looking forward to seeing what the community has to say about Accessibility Insights.

Questions or feedback? Please let us know in the comments.

Accessibility Insights is an open source set of tools that helps developers find and fix accessibility issues before they reach the customers in Web, Windows, and now in Android applications.

Thomas Dohmke

Vice President, Special Projects

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