Characterizing and Repairing Color-Related Accessibility Issues in Android Apps

As Android apps become increasingly prevalent in daily life, a common issue in the development process is the configuration of UI colors, leading to color-related accessibility issues that make the text or non-text on the app’s UI difficult to see due to low color contrast. Such color-related accessibility issues are among the top issues in apps, having a negative impact on vision and user experience. However, state-of-the-art approaches are based on predefined rules and lack an understanding of strategies for alternative colors, therefore failing to generate patches acceptable to both app users and developers. To address this research gap, we first conducted an empirical study to explore common strategies used by app developers when fixing real-world color-related accessibility issues. Based on these findings, we proposed DroidPalette, an automated approach for repairing color-related accessibility issues in Android apps. DroidPalette encodes the common strategies used by app developers for selecting issue-fixing colors, as identified in our empirical study, and combines this with the candidate issue-fixing attributes identified from the Android framework and third-party libraries to generate patches. We evaluated DroidPalette on 497 color-related accessibility issues across 105 real-world Android apps, achieving a success rate of 66.60%. Encouragingly, out of 13 patches submitted to GitHub repositories, 8 have received positive feedback from app developers.