React Native Blog • Nov 23, 2015

Making React Native Apps Accessible

Article Summary

Facebook's Ads Manager app demonstrates how React Native's Accessibility API makes mobile apps usable for everyone, including people with vision loss. Here's how they built it.

This Facebook Engineering post from 2015 introduces React Native's Accessibility API, designed to mirror familiar patterns from Android, iOS, and web accessibility. The team walks through real implementation examples from their own Ads Manager app to show developers how to build inclusive mobile experiences.

Key Takeaways

React Native's AX API mirrors Android/iOS patterns for familiar developer experience
Two core props: accessible={true} and accessibilityLabel enable screen reader support
Facebook's Ads Manager app serves as real-world implementation case study
API works consistently across iOS and Android platforms

Critical Insight

React Native provides a cross-platform accessibility API that lets developers build mobile apps usable by people with disabilities using familiar patterns from native development.

The full post dives into specific implementation details from Facebook's Ads Manager app that show how these APIs work in production.

About This Article

Problem

React Native developers didn't have a standard way to make mobile apps accessible. People with vision loss and others who rely on assistive technology like screen readers couldn't use many apps built with React Native.

Solution

Facebook's engineering team built the React Accessibility API by following the patterns already used in Android and iOS. They added core props like accessible={true} and accessibilityLabel so assistive technology could properly read UI elements.

Impact

With a consistent API that works across platforms, developers could build accessible apps using the same naming conventions they already knew from native development. Facebook's Ads Manager app shows how this approach works in practice.