Automated accessibility testing of Android mobile APPs

Abstract

A significant part of the world population experience some form of disability and face barriers in regular life, including access to information and electronic services,which makes urgent that every software developed for any platform to be accessible to all users, regardless their physical, mental or intellectual conditions. Unfortunately, studies show that many software applications in the public and private sector still presents many simple accessibility problems, yet causing many barriers for several users. There are many reasons for the low accessibility in mobile applications: lack of knowledge and training of developers; tight deadlines and functional requirements prioritization; high cost and effort of manual evaluation; limited automation for the low coverage of accessibility recommendations and app exploration strategies. This research project aims at collaboration with the automatic accessibility testing of mobile applications in many ways: increasing the number of accessibility recommendations automatically evaluated by current tools; investigating and evaluating algorithms to explore apps behavior and activities; identifying developer's needs in order to adapt tools for the automated accessibility testing in a development process and environment. Particularly, the evaluation of accessibility recommendations, the algorithms for the apps exploration and the adaptations to include an automated tool into the developer process and environment will be implemented in the MATE (Mobile Accessibility Testing) tool, which has been recently developed in the context of a FAPESP BPE project. This project will be conducted with the support of national and international collaborators, and master degree students of the host institution. (AU)