Guy Barker
Guy worked for more than twenty years as a developer at Microsoft, with most of his time focused on accessibility. In the Windows Accessibility Team he worked on the Narrator screen reader, Magnifier, On-Screen Keyboard, and UI Automation, the API that powers all accessibility in Windows. He later worked in Apps teams, again focusing on the accessibility of those apps, and finally as an accessibility consultant helping product teams across Microsoft. In his own time, Guy explored many accessibility-related topics, building free experimental assistive technology tools and soliciting feedback.
Technical Accessibility Enthusiast
Empowering All Your Users: Simple Steps for Building Accessible App Experiences
Session Type: Talk
Today a few simple design and dev considerations can make the difference between an app being usable and unusable for many people. Many UI frameworks support apps being built to empower all users, regardless of how those users interact with their devices. In this talk, I’ll demo a .NET MAUI app specifically designed to highlight considerations around accessibility, including some of the app’s features impacting the experience for blind and partially sighted users, and users who use voice input or switch input. As examples of the sorts of things I’ll demo with the accessible .NET MAUI app, here are Playing Accessible Solitaire with the iOS VoiceOver screen reader on an iPad mini, The Accessible Solitaire game using voice control on a Windows 11 laptop and an iPad mini, and The Accessible Solitaire on iPad being played with a switch device. While this app is built using .NET MAUI, the principles around accessibility apply to any app.
The app I’ll be demoing is the Accessible Solitaire app, freely available at the Apple, Google, and Microsoft Stores, and will show how one simple .NET MAUI property can make or break the usability of an app. The app code is publicly available for reference. While the app itself may seem quite basic, one user who’s blind has said that with the app, he’s completed a game of solitaire for the first time in his life. With .NET MAUI, the steps for supporting everyone on iOS, Android, and Windows is not the complicated part of building your app.
I worked as a dev at Microsoft for more than twenty years, focusing mainly in the area of accessibility. Over that period in my own time I built a variety of apps exploring the accessibility of current tech, and shared all my learnings, most recently at Barker’s Articles. These articles include some thoughts on great questions raised at the .NET MAUI Day in London earlier in 2025, Q&A from a .NET MAUI Community Standup.
After the talk, you’ll be able to consider how you can deliver more usable experiences for more people with your own apps!
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