Making Airbnb's Android App More Accessible
Article Summary
Airbnb's Android app serves millions of travelers daily. But how many users were being left behind due to accessibility barriers?
Julia Fu and Peter Elliott from Airbnb's Android team share their comprehensive approach to making one of the world's most popular travel apps accessible to all users. They detail the technical strategies, automation tools, and architectural decisions that enabled accessibility improvements at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Leveraged Design Language System to apply accessibility fixes across all screens automatically
- Built Espresso based automated testing and custom Ktlint rules to catch issues at commit time
- Implemented TalkBack optimizations: content descriptions, element grouping, and dynamic font scaling
- Created custom Compose semantics for page announcements when native APIs were unavailable
- Blocked pull requests from merging if they fail accessibility CI checks
Critical Insight
Airbnb scaled Android accessibility by embedding automated checks into CI/CD and building reusable components that inherit accessible behavior by default.
