A roadmap towards mobile applications with accessibility for visually impaired users: guideline and its evaluation

Walter Fm Correia,Marcelo E Anjos,Jefté De A Macedo,Marcelo Penha,Clauirton A Siebra

doi:10.23972/det2019iss19pp87-111

Abstract

When applications intend to support accessibility, several aspects of interface design and usability must be reviewed to adapt or extend common functional requirements that are implemented to ensure easy use of applications. However, initiatives to develop guidelines for accessible mobile applications are recent and several approaches present only suggestions rather than a concrete list of requirements. It is becoming increasingly apparent not only the need for social and digital inclusion of people with disabilities but also the urgency to make devices and applications truly accessible to anyone. This work focuses on accessibility requirements for visually impaired users and it is part of a broader effort that involves different types of impairments. Our research method was based on three main steps. First, from an initial set of 1014 scientific and technical articles, 46 were analyzed to identify requirements that are related to visual impairments. Second, we carried out an observation-based analysis to confirm the importance of these requirements, considering a set of accessibility tests with impaired volunteers. Third, the Design Thinking process was used to implement an application prototype, considering the most important requirements that were identified along with the two first steps. This application was submitted to a user-centered evaluation with volunteers, which also supported the evolution of our requirements. We sought to include prior knowledge aligned with all pre-identified requirements, culminating in something that would add to the procedure greater validation. As the main result, this paper presents the complete roadmap of this process, which resulted in a guideline and evaluation method to support the integration of accessibility aspects into mobile applications.

Highlights

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the world's population lives with some form of impairment
Registers of 40 expenses and 5 credit cards. Such Smartphones were configured under the accessibility profile of each volunteer before their use
DIRECTIONS The aim of creating mobile accessible applications to a broad set of users is a complex and demanding work, given the high variety of impairments. This current study focused only on visually impaired users and, ever considering this restriction, such a study is still providing several technical challenges

Summary

Introduction

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 15% of the world's population lives with some form of impairment. The Website Accessibility and Equality Act 2010 is an example of those (Giakoumis et al, 2010). Several websites include images that contain text as part of the pre-rendered picture file. These texts may be unreadable by the software. If the text is not embedded in the image properties or alternatively available in the text somewhere on the website, this could render the content inaccessible to visually impaired users and, be discriminatory for the Equality 2010 Act. According to Carvajal et al (2013), for over a decade, the software engineering community has been actively pursuing different lines of research targeting the incorporation of usability practices into software development.

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Conclusion