Exploring Mobile Device Accessibility: Challenges, Insights, and Recommendations for Evaluation Methodologies

Carlos Duarte Beatriz Martins

9 Desember 2022

Evaluating the accessibility of web resources is usually done by checking the conformance of the resource against a standard or set of guidelines (e.g., the WCAG 2.1). The result of the evaluation will indicate what guidelines are respected (or not) by the resource. While it might hint at the accessibility level of web resources, often it will be complicated to compare the level of accessibility of different resources or of different versions of the same resource from evaluation reports. Web accessibility metrics synthesize the accessibility level of a web resource into a quantifiable value. The fact that there is a wide number of accessibility metrics, makes it challenging to choose which ones to use. In this paper, we explore the relationship between web accessibility metrics. For that purpose, we investigated eleven web accessibility metrics. The metrics were computed from automated accessibility evaluations obtained using QualWeb. A set of around three million web pages were evaluated. By computing the metrics over this sample of nearly three million web pages, it was possible to identify groups of metrics that offer similar results. Our analysis shows that there are metrics that behave similarly, which, when deciding what metrics to use, assists in picking the metric that is less resource intensive or for which it might be easier to collect the inputs.

Navid Salehnamadi Ziyao He S. Malek

19 April 2023

Billions of people use smartphones on a daily basis, including 15% of the world’s population with disabilities. Mobile platforms encourage developers to manually assess their apps’ accessibility in the way disabled users interact with phones, i.e., through Assistive Technologies (AT) like screen readers. However, most developers only test their apps with touch gestures and do not have enough knowledge to use AT properly. Moreover, automated accessibility testing tools typically do not consider AT. This paper introduces a record-and-replay technique that records the developers’ touch interactions, replays the same actions with an AT, and generates a visualized report of various ways of interacting with the app using ATs. Empirical evaluation of this technique on real-world apps revealed that while user study is the most reliable way of assessing accessibility, our technique can aid developers in detecting complex accessibility issues at different stages of development.

João Ricardo dos S. Rosa N. M. Valentim

26 Oktober 2020

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can be an important ally in improving the quality of life of Visually Impaired People (VIP) because they provide greater independence in the performance of their daily tasks. During the development process of ICTs for VIP, the concepts of Accessibility, Usability, and User eXperience (UX) are significant because they can positively influence the system's quality. Concerning these concepts, some improvements can be considered already at the design stage, such as screen size, button format, color density, among others. However, not all designers consider Accessibility, Usability, and UX concepts when designing ICT for VIP. To identify and characterize which design technologies of Accessibility, Usability, and UX have been proposed in the literature, we performed a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). We identified a total of 23 technologies. The analysis from these technologies showed that the majority are destined for mobile applications. Besides, some design technologies only address the concept of Accessibility, and only one technology considered the concepts of Accessibility, Usability, and UX together. To support professionals, students, and researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE), this SMS presents a set of Accessibility, Usability, and UX design technologies, which can be used in the initial phases of the ICT development process for VIP.

S. Malek Navid Salehnamadi S. Branham + 3 lainnya

6 Mei 2021

For 15% of the world population with disabilities, accessibility is arguably the most critical software quality attribute. The ever-growing reliance of users with disability on mobile apps further underscores the need for accessible software in this domain. Existing automated accessibility assessment techniques primarily aim to detect violations of predefined guidelines, thereby produce a massive amount of accessibility warnings that often overlook the way software is actually used by users with disability. This paper presents a novel, high-fidelity form of accessibility testing for Android apps, called Latte, that automatically reuses tests written to evaluate an app’s functional correctness to assess its accessibility as well. Latte first extracts the use case corresponding to each test, and then executes each use case in the way disabled users would, i.e., using assistive services. Our empirical evaluation on real-world Android apps demonstrates Latte’s effectiveness in detecting substantially more useful defects than prior techniques.

J. Bhatia Dhruv Nagpal Parthasarathy P D + 2 lainnya

12 Oktober 2022

The growing interest in accessible software reflects in computing educators' and education researchers' efforts to include accessibility in core computing education. We integrated accessibility in a junior/senior-level Android app development course at a large private university in India. The course introduced three accessibility-related topics using various interventions: Accessibility Awareness (a guest lecture by a legal expert), Technical Knowledge (lectures on Android accessibility guidelines and testing practices and graded components for implementing accessibility in programming assignments), and Empathy (an activity that required students to blindfold themselves and interact with their phones using a screen-reader). We evaluated their impact on student learning using three instruments: (A) A pre/post-course questionnaire, (B) Reflective questions on each of the four programming assignments, and (C) Midterm and Final exam questions. Our findings demonstrate that: (A) significantly more (p <.05) students considered disabilities when designing an app after taking this course, (B) many students developed empathy towards the challenges persons with disabilities face while using inaccessible apps, and (C) all students could correctly identify at least one accessibility issue in the user interface of a real-world app given its screenshot and 90% of them could provide a correct solution to fix it.