Our commitment to accessibility

TalkBack, Android's screen reader, speaks what's on screen and lets you move through it by swiping. We design each of Knit's screens for how it sounds as well as how it looks.

In your chat list, each conversation is a single stop. TalkBack reads it as one sentence: who it's with, the latest message, when it arrived, whether yours was delivered and how many messages you haven't read. Deleting a conversation is in TalkBack's actions menu, so you don't need to find a long-press.

Setup reads the same way. Each page has a heading you can jump to, the progress dots read as "Step 2 of 3", and each permission button names the permission it asks for. In Settings the whole row works as the switch, and TalkBack announces it as one. Icons that only repeat the words beside them stay silent, so you don't hear everything twice.

On a mesh, a message can take a while to find its way, and the tick beside it is how you know it arrived.

Knit gives every tick words. TalkBack says Sent or Delivered, and in a group it says how many members have the message, such as "Delivered to 3 of 5", which a double tick can't show on its own. If a message travelled through an Internet relay or a Meshtastic radio, both of which are optional, TalkBack names the route too.

The status line at the top of a chat reads as a full sentence as well, so you never have to judge a coloured dot to know whether a relay or radio you've added is connected.

Recording a voice message usually means pressing and holding the microphone, a gesture that doesn't work with a screen reader. With TalkBack on, a double-tap on the microphone starts a recording that keeps going on its own, and a Stop button ends it.

A voice message is announced with its length, and play and pause are named buttons. Locking, cancelling and stopping a recording each give a short vibration, so you can tell what happened without looking.

Knit's text follows the size you pick in Android's settings. Rows grow taller to hold larger text, and screens that would otherwise push a button off the bottom scroll instead, which keeps setup and the direct file transfer prompt usable at large sizes.

Icon buttons and the profile pictures you can tap are at least 48 dp across, the size Android's guidelines recommend. On a hardware keyboard, Ctrl+Enter sends.

We test colour too. Every colour Knit gives a contact's profile picture is checked against WCAG AA's 4.5:1 contrast ratio for text, in light and dark, and again after Material You tints it toward your wallpaper. The green that marks someone online or verified meets the 3:1 ratio WCAG sets for graphics.

Movement on screen can be distracting or make people feel unwell, which is why Android has a Remove animations setting. Knit follows it the moment you change it: screen transitions become instant and loading placeholders stop pulsing.

Knit doesn't add a separate switch for this, because you've already told your phone what you want.

Knit's test suite runs more than twenty of its screens through Google's Accessibility Test Framework, the same checks behind Google Play's pre-launch report. It flags controls without a name and touch targets that are too small, and on a physical phone it also flags text without enough contrast. Any error fails the test.

Faster tests run automatically in the app's build pipeline. They confirm that a chat row reads as one sentence, that headings are marked as headings and that colours keep their contrast.

The checks still find things. In October they caught that every Accept button on the message requests screen read as just "Accept", without saying whose request it was, and that coral names and links in light-mode chat bubbles fell just short of 4.5:1. Both are fixed in Knit's source on GitHub, ahead of the next release.

Knit for iPhone is in development, and we're building it the same way. Its interface tests run Apple's accessibility audit over every screen planned for the first version, then again at the largest text size and again in dark mode. A change that fails the audit doesn't go in.

The first time we switched that audit on, it found more than a hundred problems. Fixing them gave the iPhone app colours that meet WCAG AA contrast and layouts that rearrange themselves at the largest text sizes.

These are the gaps we know about. We'd rather name them here than have you run into them.