Analyzing Accessibility Reviews Associated with Visual Disabilities or Eye Conditions

E. Alomar Wajdi Aljedaani Murtaza Tamjeed + 2 lainnya

6 Mei 2021

In recent years, mobile accessibility has become an important trend with the goal of allowing all users the possibility of using any app without many limitations. User reviews include insights that are useful for app evolution. However, with the increase in the amount of received reviews, manually analyzing them is tedious and time-consuming, especially when searching for accessibility reviews. The goal of this paper is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews, to help technology professionals in prioritizing their handling, and thus, creating more inclusive apps. Particularly, we design a model that takes as input accessibility user reviews, learns their keyword-based features, in order to make a binary decision, for a given review, on whether it is about accessibility or not. The model is evaluated using a total of 5,326 mobile app reviews. The findings show that (1) our model can accurately identify accessibility reviews, outperforming two baselines, namely keyword-based detector and a random classifier; (2) our model achieves an accuracy of 85% with relatively small training dataset; however, the accuracy improves as we increase the size of the training dataset.

Marouane Kessentini Wajdi Aljedaani Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer + 1 lainnya

11 Mei 2024

Accessibility is an important quality factor of mobile applications. Many studies have shown that, despite the availability of many resources to guide the development of accessible software, most apps and web applications contain many accessibility issues. Some researchers surveyed professionals and organizations to understand the lack of accessibility during software development, but few studies have investigated how developers and organizations respond to accessibility bug reports. Therefore, this paper analyzes accessibility bug reports posted in the Chromium repository to understand how developers and organizations handle them. More specifically, we want to determine the frequency of accessibility bug reports over time, the time-to-fix compared to traditional bug reports (e.g., functional bugs), and the types of accessibility barriers reported. Results show that the frequency of accessibility reports has increased over the years, and accessibility bugs take longer to be fixed, as they tend to be given low priority.

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.

S. Malek Ziyao He Syed Fatiul Huq + 1 lainnya

19 April 2023

It is crucial to make software, with its ever-growing influence on everyday lives, accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Despite promoting software accessibility through government regulations, development guidelines, tools and frameworks, investigations reveal a marketplace of inaccessible web and mobile applications. To better understand the limitations of contemporary software industry in adopting accessibility practices, it is necessary to construct a holistic view that combines the perspectives of software practitioners, stakeholders and end users. In this paper, we collect 637 conversations from Twitter to synthesize and qualitatively analyze discussions posted about software accessibility. Our findings observe an active community that provides feedback on inaccessible software, shares personal accounts of development practices and advocates for inclusivity. By perceiving software accessibility from process, profession and people viewpoints, we present current conventions, challenges and possible resolutions with four emergent themes: cost and incentives, awareness and advocacy, technology and resources, and integration and inclusion.

Letícia Seixas Pereira Maria Matos Carlos Duarte

11 Mei 2024

With the ubiquitous use of mobile applications, it is paramount that they are accessible, so they can empower all users, including those with different needs. Determining if an app is accessible implies conducting an accessibility evaluation. While accessibility evaluations have been thoroughly studied in the web domain, there are still many open questions when evaluating mobile applications. This paper investigates mobile accessibility evaluation methodologies. We conducted four studies, including an examination of accessibility reports from European Member-states, interviews with accessibility experts, manual evaluations, and usability tests involving users. Our investigations have uncovered significant limitations in current evaluation methods, suggesting that the absence of authoritative guidelines and standards, similar to what exists for the web, but tailored specifically to mobile devices, hampers the effectiveness of accessibility evaluation and monitoring activities. Based on our findings, we present a set of recommendations aimed at improving the evaluation methodologies for assessing mobile applications’ accessibility.