04-18, 11:30–12:10 (Europe/Rome), Auditorium
One of the main goals for an app developer should be to reach everyone. To achieve this, it's important to enable as many users as possible to use our apps easily. Therefore, in addition to a good design and a good user experience, Accessibility plays a fundamental role in achieving this goal.
We are not all the same, and there are many people in the world who need assistance to utilize the tools we typically use every day: we're talking about one every seven people, and given the current world population of 8 billion individuals, we're referring to nearly a billion people. With the European Accessibility Act of 2019, the EU has defined some guidelines aimed at breaking down barriers and enabling people with different kind of disabilities to access products and services of daily use. Since 2021, all public sector websites and mobile apps must comply with those guidelines, and as of June 2025, private sector will also need to comply. Our time is running out.
Integrating accessibility is indeed beneficial for everyone: obviously for the elderly and those with temporary disabilities, but anyone will benefit from an accessible design that offers multiple ways to interact with the app and understand it clearly, even in difficult environments such as low lighting or high noise (e.g. through both visual and auditory signals).
SwiftUI was born integrating accessibility from day one, and major companies like Apple invest heavily in this area. The technologies integrated into Swift are easy to use, and we'll see how to bring them into our projects, what tools we can use to test them, some practical examples of code, and the real-world benefits.
Davide's passion for computer science remains undiminished since embarking on his career as an iOS developer 12 years ago. That enthusiasm is kept alive by: evolving technology that becomes increasingly effective, challenges and certifications and training events like Swift Heroes, but above all, teaching for 8 years at IED in Rome and shaping future developers.
For the past 3 years, he has been working at NTT DATA Italia as Team Leader, and developing with native iOS and Flutter. Having targeted many different sectors and faced countless situations and changes over the years, there are many topics to talk about, however he thinks the need for accessible apps is the subject closest to his heart, because it is something that affects him closely, as he will discuss in the talk.