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

Context. Nowadays, mobile applications represent the principal means to enable human interaction. Being so pervasive, these applications should be made usable for all users: accessibility collects the guidelines that developers should follow to include features allowing users with disabilities (e.g., visual impairments) to better interact with an application. Problem. While research in this field is gaining interest, there is still a notable lack of knowledge on how developers practically deal with the problem: (i) whether they are aware and take accessibility guidelines into account when developing apps, (ii) which guidelines are harder for them to implement, and (iii) which tools they use to be supported in this task. Objective. To bridge the gap of knowledge on the state of the practice concerning the accessibility of mobile applications. Method. Adopting a mixed-method research approach, we aim to (i) verify how accessibility guidelines are implemented in mobile applications through a coding strategy and (ii) survey mobile developers on the issues and challenges of dealing with accessibility in practice. Limitations. Threats are represented by the size of the app sample and the number of answers to our survey study.