If you have a regulatory requirement to provide accessibility in your app (spoiler, you do) the chances are it will say you have a requirement to reach WCAG AA. While this is likely meaningless to anyone other an accessibility professionals, in short it means you are providing the minimum level of accessibility features required to make your app usable by the majority of people.

This post is about one such requirement, the jazzily titled Success Criterion 1.3.4. 1.3.4 is often overlooked, I’ve see it forgotten by accessibility auditors, overlooked by testers, removed by engineers, and ignored by designers. Yet this feature is one that is already enabled by default in your app. One that you have to choose to disable. For both Android and iOS when you create a new app, the app supports landscape mode out of the box, and all you need to do to continue supporting it is to build robust interfaces, and not disable it. Yet often one of the first things developers do when creating a new app is to disable landscape modes.