A Review of Popular Applications on Google Play - Do They Cater to Visually Impaired Users?

TL;DR

This paper reviews the accessibility of popular Google Play applications for visually impaired users, highlighting gaps and proposing a developer framework to enhance accessibility features.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of current app accessibility for visually impaired users and introduces a framework for developers to improve accessibility in Android applications.

Findings

Many popular apps lack accessibility features.

A weak positive correlation exists between app popularity and accessibility.

A developer framework for improving app accessibility is proposed.

Abstract

The number of applications on online mobile application stores is increasing at a rapid rate. Smart-phones are used by a wide range of people varying in age, and also in the ability to use a smart phone. With the increasing dependency on smart-phones, the paper aims to determine whether the popular applications on Google Play, the official store for Android applications, can be used by people with vision impairment. The accessibility of the applications was tested using an external keyboard, and TalkBack, an accessibility tool developed by Google. It was found that several popular applications on the store were not designed keeping accessibility in mind. It was observed that there exists a weak positive relationship between the popularity of the application and its accessibility. A framework is proposed that can be used by developers to improve the accessibility of an application. The paper also discusses the programming aspects to be considered while developing an Android application, so that the application can be used by sighted as well as visually impaired users.