RFC: Make mobile more accessible

[vatsalyagoel]

We all talk about moving towards a more accessible web. This leaves out a category that we all use in our daily lives i.e. Mobile applications. How about we change that by adding an accessibility plugin/package to ReactiveUI.

I did a bit of research on what Xamarin Forms offers us in terms of accessibility and having a read through https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/xamarin-forms/app-fundamentals/accessibility/ tells us that XF has built in support for screen readers and buttons/text entry handles. It's just that when people make XF applications they forget or leave out accessibility all together.

By creating conventions around writing controls we can modify fields to be like :

<Entry AutomationProperties.IsInAccessibleTree="true" />
and then and help text around it with the placeholder forms or actions:

<Button Text="Toggle ActivityIndicator" AutomationProperties.IsInAccessibleTree="true" AutomationProperties.HelpText="Tap to toggle the activity indicator" />

Lets discuss what the implementation could look like and move towards a more accessible mobile

https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/mobile/

[glennawatson]

Is this for setting the variables on the RxUI provided classes, or some sort of similar API to RxUI binding?

Eg what's stopping the user from using those xam forms properties already?

[vatsalyagoel]

Something we could add into the controls RxUI provides.

TBH nothing is stopping the user from using those properties however it is something that gets ignored either as a by product of not knowing about it or not taking accessibility into account

[glennawatson]

I guess also if we are getting serious about our own local controls we should localise the accessibility messages to various languages so we'd probably need volunteers to translate.