A survey on the tool support for the automatic evaluation of mobile accessibility

Abstract

To make a mobile app or website accessible, developers must incorporate accessibility practices into the development activities and perform accessibility evaluations. Accessibility evaluation is usually a manual approach, which can be laborious and difficult to scale or reproduce. Often, the implementation and evaluation of accessibility requirements are overlooked by developers due to high demand and time to market pressure. Automating mobile accessibility evaluation can help, but few approaches and tools are currently available. In addition, few studies discuss for which accessibility guidelines automatic evaluation is supported. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to survey automated accessibility evaluation tools for mobile applications to identify which accessibility properties can be automatically evaluated given the available tools. We expect our findings will provide practitioners with an overview of which tools are available for automatic accessibility evaluation and what are their capabilities. By exploring the limitations of current approaches, we also discuss where developers have little support, thus providing guidance for future research, innovation and development in this field.