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

Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Ben Ogilvie, head of accessibility at ArcTouch, to learn more about why so many apps are behind.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Ben Ogilvie: 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.

Meghan McCarty Carino: 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?

Ogilvie: 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 retro fit responsive design into mobile apps, if it wasn't considered in the initial user experience journeys and in the original design flows. We've talked to high performing accessibility teams that perform well in many other aspects of accessibility but still struggle to support orientation because those apps have 10 years of legacy code in place, and the process of redesigning and retrofitting the components that are in those apps is a bridge too far, and it would require almost throwing everything out and starting over. And so it's one of those things that we encourage our clients from the very beginning to think about both landscape and portrait orientation from day one, even if it's something that they can continue to improve on later. If you don't consider it from the beginning, it's really difficult to go back and add it in later.

McCarty Carino: In the report, you don't call out any apps by name, but you do sort of compare scores across different types of apps like food delivery, streaming, shopping. Were there any clear trends that you noted there?

Ogilvie: We did. We noticed that of the five industries we tested, the retail and shopping industry performed the worst, which was really surprising. They have objectively the most to directly gain from building apps that are usable by everyone. But we found that they had a 41 out of 100 average industry accessibility score. On the other end of the spectrum, we found that the streaming industry performed best of the five industries looked at, but that was still a 60 out of 100 score. So there's still a long way to go, even for streaming. We have a working theory that the streaming industry benefited from years of traditional broadcast media accessibility regulation, which the streaming industry was born out of, and so maybe they got a head start in building content accessibly, but again, they've still got a lot, a long way to go.

McCarty Carino: Do you have any theories about why it seems shopping apps are far behind, despite having, as you noted, you know, kind of a profit incentive to improve?

Ogilvie: I have an idea that retail moves so quickly, and I think that culture begets sort of a "move fast and break things" kind of environment. If accessibility is not considered as part of the core culture of building a product in an environment that's fast paced like that, it's really easy for it to fall by the wayside or not be considered, or not directly connected to the measurables and deliverables that people on those teams are held accountable to. It's so easy for something like accessibility to fall by the wayside unless everyone is aligned and understands that it is in service of broader market reach and higher profitability, plus being the right thing to do and all the other softer reasons for supporting accessibility is just good business.

McCarty Carino: We've talked a lot about the shortcomings. Were there any bright spots? You know, have apps improved in any meaningful way?

Ogilvie: So this is our first time putting this report together, so this is the first time we have a benchmark with this level of depth that we know of. However, there was a report put out a number of years ago by Joe Devon, who's one of the founders of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, or GAAD. He put out a state of accessibility report that looked at both websites and later mobile apps. We then saw this report as picking up the baton, and so while the iOS and Android platforms are providing better tools over time, I think the big shift in building a culture of accessibility is still kind of in the same place that it was a number of years ago. You asked about bright spots, we had two of the apps we tested that scored great, which we considered an 85 or above score. One was in fitness, and the other was in food and delivery. And those two apps raised the overall score for their industries, despite some of the other performers on the other end of the spectrum, pulling things down. But two out of 50 shows that we have a lot of work to do.

McCarty Carino: What did those two do right?

Ogilvie: We found that they had not taken kind of a screen by screen approach, but they had really thought about the entire user flow and that the experience was consistent from one end to the other for multiple types of assistive technologies. For example, they supported both landscape and portrait orientation. And then lastly, they had things like great and in some cases really evocative, alternative text. They had language that resonated and aligned with their broader brand identity, not just utilitarian text, but when appropriate, things that really brought out an equitable experience as someone who was seeing an image visually to bring out that same emotion, and that shows that a team is really going above and beyond the basic conformance requirements, and is really thinking about building a wonderful user experience for all users.

McCarty Carino: So what would be your advice to companies or to app developers about you know how to kind of make these design decisions?

Ogilvie: First is get your teams trained on the basics. Everyone has their role to play in building accessible products. The second is bring in users with disabilities throughout the process. And the third is, if you are new to doing this work, bring in experts to help upskill your team and accelerate your learning curve. It is a broad and deep topic, the way that the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG apply to native mobile requires some interpretation, and so getting folks in the room who have that experience and can help you move past the initial learning curve more quickly is one of the most important things you can do.

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Ben also pointed out that improving these apps isn't just the right thing to do morally or for financial reasons, it's also increasingly the law in many places.

The Department of Justice and several court cases in the U.S. have interpreted the Americans with Disabilities Act as applicable to apps and websites.

And in the European Union, the European Accessibility Act requires websites and apps to comply by this June.