Accessibility of Mobile Platforms

Abstract

This paper compares accessibility features of two popular platforms from a user perspective. The comparison is based on accessibility features for different kinds of disabilities such as vision, hearing or physically challenged users. A section on accessibility in mobile applications follows. According to a survey [1], the use of mobile platforms by people with disabilities is dramatically increasing. New accessibility features are introduced for each release of these platforms which makes them an affordable assistive technology.

The Making of Accessible Android Applications: An Empirical Study on the State of the Practice

“…The identified accessibility guidelines are a set of technological agnostic best practices for mobile web content, hybrid, and native apps. The guidelines are based on the content requirements of three de-facto standard providers of information on the matter, i.e., the ANDROID developer's documentation, 1 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) community, 2 and the BBC Standards and Guidelines academy. 3 We combine the three providers to create a comprehensive set of accessibility guidelines organized into 11 categories.…”

“…In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap of knowledge by presenting an empirical investigation into the making of mobile apps from the perspective of accessibility. We focus on ANDROID not only because it has been the subject of previous accessibility studies, but also because still little is known of how to best engineer the problem in ANDROID devices-as opposite to IOS and APPLE in general, which provide an integrated set of devices and features to handle accessibility [2].…”

The making of accessible Android applications: an empirical study on the state of the practice

“…On the one hand, it has been the subject of previous accessibility studies. On the other hand, although a vast number of apps is developed worldwide on this platform, still little is known on how to best engineer the problem in ANDROID devices-as opposite to IOS and APPLE, which provide an integrated set of devices and features to handle accessibility (Darvishy 2014). More particularly, we discussed our plan toward this goal by defining two research questions to understand (i) whether and to what extent the available accessibility guidelines are implemented in ANDROID applications and (ii) the developer's opinions about the matter.…”