When Can Accessibility Help?: An Exploration of Accessibility Feature Recommendation on Mobile Devices

TL;DR

This paper investigates the low awareness of accessibility features on mobile devices among older adults and explores automated recommendation systems as a means to increase awareness and usage.

Contribution

It quantifies awareness gaps through surveys and introduces four prototype recommenders to enhance accessibility feature adoption among older users.

Findings

Very few users are aware of built-in accessibility features.

Automated recommendations can effectively increase feature awareness.

Prototype recommenders provide insights into improving accessibility adoption.

Abstract

Numerous accessibility features have been developed and included in consumer operating systems to provide people with a variety of disabilities additional ways to access computing devices. Unfortunately, many users, especially older adults who are more likely to experience ability changes, are not aware of these features or do not know which combination to use. In this paper, we first quantify this problem via a survey with 100 participants, demonstrating that very few people are aware of built-in accessibility features on their phones. These observations led us to investigate accessibility recommendation as a way to increase awareness and adoption. We developed four prototype recommenders that span different accessibility categories, which we used to collect insights from 20 older adults. Our work demonstrates the need to increase awareness of existing accessibility features on mobile devices, and shows that automated recommendation could help people find beneficial accessibility features.