You know, digital spaces need to be accessible too.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Developers of mobile apps have room for improvement in making their platforms fully accessible for disabled users.

That's according to a new report from the software company ArcTouch and the digital research platform Fable.

It looked at 50 popular apps and assessed them for features that improve

accessibility like screen reading, text size adjustability, voice controls, and multiple screen

orientations. The apps were tested by disabled users who reported a poor or failing experience

almost three quarters of the time. We spoke with Ben

O'Gilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.

Both iOS and Android have native components built in for developers to use, which have some of

the accessibility work done for them.

A lot of developers don't take advantage of those native components.

And sometimes even if they do, they've got the building blocks, but they don't piece them

together in a way that works well.

So I'd say it's a combination of lack of awareness, lack of testing,

and lack of inclusion of users with disabilities in the design, development, testing, and

release process all the way through. One of the lowest design scores that you sort of consistently gave to many apps was about whether

they enable landscape orientation. That's kind of surprising. That seems like a very basic function.

It is. It's one of those things that needs to be accounted for from the very beginning.

It's really difficult to go back

and retrofit responsive design into mobile apps if it wasn't considered in the initial

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