Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile Apps

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated system for generating comprehensive accessibility reports for mobile apps by integrating multiple data collection methods, advanced de-duplication, and summarization techniques, improving upon existing single-screen scanners.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel system that combines app crawling, manual recording, and accessibility scanning with new de-duplication and summarization models for whole app accessibility reporting.

Findings

Screen grouping model with 96.9% accuracy

UI element matching with 97% accuracy

Qualitative evaluation with 18 engineers shows system effectiveness

Abstract

Many apps have basic accessibility issues, like missing labels or low contrast. Automated tools can help app developers catch basic issues, but can be laborious or require writing dedicated tests. We propose a system, motivated by a collaborative process with accessibility stakeholders at a large technology company, to generate whole app accessibility reports by combining varied data collection methods (e.g., app crawling, manual recording) with an existing accessibility scanner. Many such scanners are based on single-screen scanning, and a key problem in whole app accessibility reporting is to effectively de-duplicate and summarize issues collected across an app. To this end, we developed a screen grouping model with 96.9% accuracy (88.8% F1-score) and UI element matching heuristics with 97% accuracy (98.2% F1-score). We combine these technologies in a system to report and summarize unique issues across an app, and enable a unique pixel-based ignore feature to help engineers and testers better manage reported issues across their app's lifetime. We conducted a qualitative evaluation with 18 accessibility-focused engineers and testers which showed this system can enhance their existing accessibility testing toolkit and address key limitations in current accessibility scanning tools.