Accessibility on Seldeo: staying in touch shouldn't need perfect eyesight

Why this matters more for us than for most apps

Seldeo exists so that the people who matter to you can stay in touch — grandparents, close friends, the family member who lives three time zones away. The blunt reality of that goal is that some of those people have low vision, limited fine-motor control, or use a screen reader every day. An app that only works well for a twenty-five-year-old with perfect eyesight has failed at the exact thing Seldeo is for.

So accessibility on Seldeo is not a compliance checkbox we add at the end. It is part of the definition of "done" for a feature. A screen that a blind grandmother cannot use to see her grandchild's photo is a broken screen, regardless of how it looks in a design review.

This post is the concrete list — what we ship today, and where we know we still have work to do.

Text that scales with you

Every piece of text in the Seldeo app respects the text-size setting you already chose in your phone's system settings. If you've turned the system font up because small text is hard to read, Seldeo's text comes up with it — captions, buttons, timestamps, and body copy all included.

Two things make this more than a token gesture:

Layouts reflow instead of clipping. When text grows, rows grow with it and wrap onto new lines rather than cutting a word off at the edge of the screen. We test the app at the largest accessibility text sizes, not just the default, because that is where most apps quietly break.
We never bake text into an image. Text you need to read is always real, selectable, scalable text — never a picture of text that a screen reader can't announce and a larger font setting can't touch.

Built for screen readers, not merely "compatible" with them

Seldeo is built to be driven entirely by VoiceOver on iOS and TalkBack on Android. That means more than the screen reader technically being able to move through the app:

Every button, icon, and control has a spoken label that describes what it does, not what it looks like. A control is announced as "Reply to message from Amara", not "button".
Images from the people you follow can carry the description their author added, so a photo is announced as something meaningful rather than a dead end.
The reading order matches the visual order. When you swipe through a screen with a screen reader, you move through it top to bottom the way it reads, with no elements stranded out of sequence.
Live updates — a new message arriving, a call starting — are announced politely, without hijacking whatever you were in the middle of reading.

Motion you can turn down

Some people get motion sickness from the sliding, zooming, and parallax animations that modern apps lean on. Some people just find them exhausting. Both are legitimate.

Seldeo honours your system "Reduce Motion" setting. Turn it on and the large transitions become simple, quick fades. The app still feels responsive — nothing is removed that you need — but the sweeping motion that can make a screen hard to follow is gone. This pairs with our wider stance on a calmer product; see The quieter feed for the philosophy behind it.

Captions and media

Video on Seldeo supports captions, and we treat them as a first-class part of a post rather than an afterthought. Captions matter for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, and they also matter for the far larger group of people watching with the sound off on a quiet train. When a creator provides a caption track, we render it; where automatic captions are available, they are clearly marked as automatic so no one mistakes a machine transcript for the creator's own words.

Contrast, color, and touch targets

Contrast. Text and the controls you need to find are held to a contrast ratio that stays readable in bright sunlight and for people with low vision. We do not rely on pale grey text on a white card for anything you actually need to read.
Color is never the only signal. A control is never "the red one" with no other cue. State is carried by labels, shapes, and icons too, so the app works for people with color-vision differences.
Touch targets have room. Buttons are sized and spaced so that they can be hit reliably by someone with a tremor or limited dexterity, not just by a steady thumb.

One-handed, low-effort by design

A lot of Seldeo's calmer design choices double as accessibility choices. There are no streaks to maintain, no timers counting down, no pressure to act quickly before a story expires from view. Nobody is racing you. That matters enormously for someone who navigates their phone slowly, whether because of age, a motor condition, or a screen reader's pace. The same restraint applies to how rarely we interrupt you — see Notifications, restrained.

What we haven't finished

Honesty is part of our editorial policy, so here is the unfinished list:

Author-supplied image descriptions are supported but not yet prompted for at post time as firmly as we'd like. We want adding a description to feel as natural as adding a caption.
Automatic captions don't yet cover every language we serve. Where they're missing, the gap is visible rather than papered over.
Voice Control on iOS and Switch Access on Android work across most of the app, but we are still auditing the last few complex screens (group calls, the media editor) to guarantee every action is reachable by name.

We'd rather ship this list publicly than pretend the work is done. If you use assistive technology and something on Seldeo gets in your way, that's a bug to us, and we want to hear about it through the in-app Help → Report a problem flow.

The short version

Accessibility isn't a feature we added to Seldeo. It's a consequence of what Seldeo is for. A network built to keep families close only earns that description if it works for the family members who need it most — and we'd rather be measured against that bar than a lower one.