Make apps more accessible

Try to make your Android app usable for everyone, including people with accessibility needs.

People with impaired vision, color blindness, impaired hearing, impaired dexterity, cognitive disabilities, and many other disabilities use Android devices. When you develop apps with accessibility in mind, you make the user experience better for people with accessibility needs.

This page presents guidelines for implementing key elements of accessibility so that everyone can use your app more easily. For more in-depth guidance on how to make your app more accessible, see Principles for improving app accessibility.

Increase text visibility

For each set of text within your app, we recommend the color contrast—or difference in perceived brightness between the color of the text and the color of the background behind the text—to be above a specific threshold. The exact threshold depends on the text's font size and whether the text appears in bold:

  • If the text is smaller than 18sp, or if the text is bold and smaller than 14sp, use foreground and background colors that result in a color contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1.
  • For all other text, set the color contrast ratio to at least 3:1.

The following image shows two examples of text-to-background color contrast:

Two examples of the word 'Text' on colored backgrounds. The example on the left has low color contrast between the text and background, while the example on right has sufficient color contrast.
Figure 1. Lower than recommended (left) and sufficient (right) color contrast.

To check the text-to-background color contrast in your app, use an online color contrast checker or the Accessibility Scanner app.

Use large, simple controls

Your app's UI is easier to use if its controls are easier to see and tap. For touch interfaces, we recommend that each interactive UI element have a focusable area, or touch target size, of at least 48dpx48dp. Larger is even better.

In Jetpack Compose, many built-in Material components like Button, IconButton, and ListItem already enforce this minimum size. However, when creating custom interactive elements, you need to set the size yourself.

In the following snippet, a small UI element is made accessible by giving it a larger touch target:

@Composable
private fun LargeBox() {
    var clicked by remember { mutableStateOf(false) }
    Box(
        Modifier
            .size(100.dp)
            .background(if (clicked) Color.DarkGray else Color.LightGray)
    ) {
        Box(
            Modifier
                .align(Alignment.Center)
                .clickable { clicked = !clicked }
                .background(Color.Black)
                .sizeIn(minWidth = 48.dp, minHeight = 48.dp)
        )
    }
}
AccessibilitySnippets.kt

For more information about touch target sizes, see Minimum touch target sizes.

Describe each UI element

For each UI element in your app, include a description that describes the element's purpose. In most cases, you include this description in the element's contentDescription attribute, as shown in the following code snippet:

@Composable
private fun ShareButton(onClick: () -> Unit) {
    IconButton(onClick = onClick) {
        Icon(
            imageVector = Icons.Filled.Share,
            contentDescription = stringResource(R.string.label_share)
        )
    }
}
AccessibilitySnippets.kt

Note that you do not need to provide a contentDescription for Text composables. Android accessibility services (like TalkBack) automatically announce the text itself.

When adding descriptions to your app's UI elements, keep the following best practices in mind:

  • Use descriptions to convey the purpose and result of the interaction, not the visual details. Use the Role semantics property (like Role.Button or Role.Switch) to expose a UI element's type. This way, screen readers can announce the element correctly.

  • Avoid redundancies in descriptions. For example, if selecting a button causes a "submit" action to occur in your app, make the button's description "Submit", not "Submit button".

  • Each description should be unique. That way, when screen reader users encounter a repeated element description, they correctly recognize that the focus is on an element that already had focus earlier. In particular, each item within a list such as LazyColumn should have a different description, each reflecting the content that's unique to a given item, such as the name of a city in a list of locations.

  • Use the hideFromAccessibility API to mark purely decorative elements so that accessibility services can ignore them. If a UI element has a contentDescription parameter but is purely decorative (such as an Icon that is part of another UI element), pass null to avoid redundant labeling. For more elaborate use cases, see Merging and clearing.

  • Test your code to make sure the content description is delivered as expected. Android Lint, Compose testing, and manual and automated test tools can flag common issues and expose problems in your implementation.

Additional resources

To learn more about making your app more accessible, see the following additional resources:

Codelabs

Videos

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