Can Everyone use my app? An Empirical Study on Accessibility in Android Apps

Abstract

Universal design principles aim to improve accessibility by ensuring product designs consider all users, including those with certain disabilities (e.g., visual impairments). In the case of mobile apps, accessibility is mostly provided by existing features in mobile devices, like TalkBack on Android that reads information to users. However, it is not clear to what extent developers actually implement universal design principles or utilize these technologies to support accessibility of their applications. By performing a mining-based pilot study, we observed developers seldom use Accessibility APIs and there is a limited usage of assistive descriptions. Then, we focused on understanding the perspective of developers through an investigation of posts from StackOverflow. We identified the aspects of accessibility that developers implemented as well as experienced difficulty (or lack of understanding). We performed a formal open-coding of 366 discussions threads with multi-author agreement to create a taxonomy regarding the aspects discussed by developers with respect to accessibility in Android. From the qualitative analysis, we distilled lessons to guide further research and actions in aiding developers with supporting users that require assistive features.