Designing the Swiggy App to Be Truly Accessible (Episode 2)
Article Summary
Swiggy saw 5x growth in accessibility sessions after fixing one critical UX problem: their Android app treated screen reader users like robots, not humans.
Swiggy's Android team shares 9 specific technical implementations they used to make their food ordering flow accessible. They applied the POUR principle (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust) to serve the 46% of people over 60 who have disabilities.
Key Takeaways
- Grouped restaurant cards so users hear all info at once, not per element
- Replaced robotic 'double tap to activate' with meaningful actions like 'order' or 'subscribe'
- Used accessibility live regions for polite cart updates that don't interrupt navigation
- Added custom actions to multi-action views to reduce focus shifts
- Implemented smart OTP timer announcements that only speak when focused
After implementing these 9 Android accessibility patterns, Swiggy saw 5x session growth in 3 months from users with disabilities.
About This Article
Swiggy's Android app didn't group views properly, so screen reader users had to move focus around repeatedly just to hear all the restaurant details. This broke the Operable requirement from the POUR principle.
Shivam Gautam's team added 9 accessibility patterns. They set focusable="true" on parent layouts, used android:contentDescription attributes, and overrode onInitializeAccessibilityNodeInfo() to assign roles and custom actions.
After adding accessibility live regions with polite announcements and meaningful click actions throughout the food ordering flow, Swiggy saw 5x session growth in three months from users with disabilities.