Abra releases Abra Mobile app

Abra Mobile is now a stand-alone app, available on the App Store and Google Play. The app is a practical way to browse accessibility rules, checks and components. The components intentionally contain accessibility issues, which can be automatically detected by our tooling.

For the past two years, Abra Mobile shipped as part of Abra Desktop, as a host app. Abra Desktop needed it to run our test suite on your Android or iOS device. The app embeds Abra SDK, which does the actual checking. Otherwise, the app did not have much to offer; which has changed in this new version.

A closer look

Open the app and you see the rule list first. There are thirteen rules so far, matching the coverage of our tooling. They range from name/role/state/value checks to language, orientation, and target size.

Tap a rule and you see its checks. Take "Focusable name correct" as an example. It has eleven checks: whitespace-only names, invalid characters, duplicated content, and more. Each check is a specific, testable problem.

Tap a check and you land on the component itself: an example of the accessibility issue.

You can switch between multiple framework implementations.

• On Android, that means Compose and XML.

• On iOS, that means SwiftUI and UIKit.

A shared benchmark

Our internal test suite runs automated checks against Abra Mobile, so every rule and check gets validated against known issues before we ship it. Abra Mobile is not only a reference for you. It is also an additional quality check for us.

That same idea, testing against known issues, is why we think Abra Mobile is useful outside our own team too.

Mobile accessibility tools are hard to compare. Vendors publish rule lists and marketing claims, but there is no neutral way to check what a tool actually finds.

The web world has something for this: the W3C's ACT Rules, a shared set of test cases the accessibility community uses to check rule engines against.

Abra Mobile can do something similar for mobile apps. Every component is a known, deliberate violation, paired with the exact check it should trigger, across multiple frameworks per platform. That makes it a benchmark.

Point any accessibility testing tool at Abra Mobile's screens, and see what it actually finds. If you are choosing a vendor, that tells you more than a feature list ever will.

The screenshot below shows an example of benchmarking the Abra tooling against the Abra Mobile app.

Building accessible apps

We do not just tell developers how to build accessible apps. We build and ship accessible apps ourselves.

Abra Mobile is not only about accessibility. It is also built to be accessible.

The app supports text scaling, dark mode, and landscape mode. It works with screen readers and voice control. Text and interface elements meet contrast requirements. It is the same standard we ask you to apply to your own app.

You can download the Abra Mobile app for free.

• Android: Google Play

  • Package name: ai.abra.mobile.android

• iOS: App Store

  • Bundle identifier: ai.abra.mobile.ios

Browse the rules and checks. Try the components. And if you are comparing accessibility testing tools, point them at Abra Mobile and see what they find.