Do Android app users care about accessibility?: an analysis of user reviews on the Google play store

Abstract

Mobile applications (or apps) have become a popular platform to provide users with information, digital content and services. Unfortunately, many studies have shown that even popular mobile applications still have many accessibility issues. A particular characteristic of mobile development is that developers tend to take into account comments published on official app stores to plan for new releases of their apps. Some researchers have classified user reviews into different categories, including user interface issues, but none of them have investigated whether accessibility is a topic addressed by user comments. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present an investigation we carried out to find out whether and how accessible is addressed by user reviews published on app stores. In our investigation, we analysed 701 Android apps available on the Google Play Store and found out that reviews associated with accessibility are scarce (1.2% of all reviews); user reviews usually refer to a small subset of accessibility issues; and users give reasonable good scores to mobile apps even when they report accessibility issues, with the exception of very specific cases. It seems our results show that user reviews have not been used to suggest developers to improve mobile apps accessibility.