AccessiText: automated detection of text accessibility issues in Android apps

For 15% of the world population with disabilities, accessibility is arguably the most critical software quality attribute. The growing reliance of users with disability on mobile apps to complete their day-to-day tasks further stresses the need for accessible software. Mobile operating systems, such as iOS and Android, provide various integrated assistive services to help individuals with disabilities perform tasks that could otherwise be difficult or not possible. However, for these assistive services to work correctly, developers have to support them in their app by following a set of best practices and accessibility guidelines. Text Scaling Assistive Service (TSAS) is utilized by people with low vision, to increase the text size and make apps accessible to them. However, the use of TSAS with incompatible apps can result in unexpected behavior introducing accessibility barriers to users. This paper presents AccessiText, an automated testing technique for text accessibility issues arising from incompatibility between apps and TSAS. As a first step, we identify five different types of text accessibility by analyzing more than 600 candidate issues reported by users in (i) app reviews for Android and iOS, and (ii) Twitter data collected from public Twitter accounts. To automatically detect such issues, AccessiText utilizes the UI screenshots and various metadata information extracted using dynamic analysis, and then applies various heuristics informed by the different types of text accessibility issues identified earlier.

Evaluation of AccessiText on 30 real-world Android apps corroborates its effectiveness by achieving 88.27% precision and 95.76% recall on average in detecting text accessibility issues.

• Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging; • Human-centered computing → Accessibility design and evaluation methods.