React Native Accessibility Is Pretty Bad

I mean, none of these concerns are specific to React Native, really; any lowest common denominator framework has the same issue. Accessibility is too rarely considered by designers, or more specifically the designers' bosses, who seem to think of it as an afterthought to be tacked on later as an optional bonus; it should be a core consideration.

In iOS, it's been a core part of the system frameworks for 9 years. That builds on over a decade of the same accessibility frameworks in macOS. There's really no reason that every new, popular, and widely-used user interface framework or library can't implement accessibility 100% on the two primary mobile operating systems.

Last year's WWDC session[1] on designing with accessibility in mind was just a reminder, but it really should be considered a mandatory part of user interface testing. If a company can't afford that aspect of testing, then they should really consider what frameworks and libraries they're using, how they're developing, and what trade-offs are involved.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/806/

>Allow me to preface this by saying that React Native sets out to solve problems I don’t think are very interesting to solve. In particular I don’t think that sharing a single UI between disparate platforms is desirable from any perspective that isn’t cost savings and that even from that perspective it’s dicey.

Allow me to disagree. Mobile development is a mess these days. Doing stuff in React native is way easier than native (when there is a module that implements what you want), so most of the time you do things (a lot) faster. Sure, react native needs a lot of work and stop breaking things every single version they update and the modules need to step up in quality. I hope with the fabric rewrite, things get much better.

I’m using React Native for a lot of projects these days so this is pretty worrying. Seems like there’s a lot that react-navigation could be doing.