Accessibility

Hello World should work for you whether or not you can see the screen, hear a voice note, or read small text.

Where we actually are

Let us be straight about this: Hello World has not been through a formal accessibility audit, and we do not claim conformance to WCAG or any other standard. What follows is what has been built and tested informally, and what has not. When an audit happens, this page will say so and what it found.

In the app

VoiceOver

Controls throughout the app carry spoken labels rather than being read out as unnamed buttons, including the ones that are icons only. The tab bar is labelled, so each tab is announced by name even though it shows no caption by default.

Text size

Hello World follows the text size set in iOS, including the larger accessibility sizes. Layouts are built to grow rather than to clip — if you find text cut off or overlapping at a large size, that is a bug and we would like to know about it.

Tab labels

The bar at the bottom shows icons only by default. If you would rather have names under them, turn on Show labels in Settings › Personalization.

Motion

Where iOS reports that you have asked for reduced motion, animations are shortened or removed.

Dark mode and contrast

Light and dark both ship and follow your system setting, or can be fixed to one in Settings. Chat backgrounds sit behind text at reduced contrast so that the words stay readable over them.

Hearing

Voice notes are transcribed — you can read a voice message rather than listening to it, in your own language. This is a translation feature, and it is also the reason a deaf user can take part in a conversation carried by voice notes. Calls are not captioned.

Speech

Translated messages can be spoken aloud in the languages we have voices for, which lets someone who finds reading hard hear a message instead.

What does not work well yet

• Calls have no captions or live transcription. A call is not translated or transcribed while it is happening.
• Spoken playback is not available in every language, so in some languages a translated voice note arrives only as text.
• The camera and its effects are visual, and are not usable without sight.
• Permission prompts are in English on a phone set to French or Spanish. The app itself is translated; the iOS prompts asking for the microphone and camera are not yet.
• No formal audit, as above — so there will be problems we have not found.

On this website

These pages are plain HTML with no JavaScript. They work with a screen reader, keyboard, or a browser with styles turned off; headings are real headings, links say where they go, and the text reflows to any window or text size. Light and dark follow your system. There are no cookies, no banners to dismiss, and no pop-ups.

Telling us about a problem

If something in Hello World is difficult or impossible for you to use, please tell us — Settings › Send Feedback in the app, or support@helloworldmessenger.com with “Accessibility” in the subject line.

It helps to know which assistive technology you use and what you expected to happen. Accessibility problems are treated as bugs, not as requests.