Adaptive and Accessible User Interfaces for Seniors Through Model-Driven Engineering

TL;DR

This paper introduces AdaptForge, a model-driven engineering approach that systematically creates adaptive, accessible mobile app interfaces tailored to seniors' needs, addressing the lack of personalized solutions in current development practices.

Contribution

The paper presents AdaptForge, a novel MDE framework with domain-specific languages for designing and implementing personalized, accessible interfaces for senior users in mobile applications.

Findings

Evaluations show AdaptForge effectively supports senior accessibility needs.

Developers find AdaptForge useful for creating personalized interfaces.

Senior users report improved usability and satisfaction.

Abstract

The use of diverse mobile applications among senior users is becoming increasingly widespread. However, many of these apps contain accessibility problems that result in negative user experiences for seniors. A key reason is that software practitioners often lack the time or resources to address the broad spectrum of age-related accessibility and personalisation needs. As current developer tools and practices encourage one-size-fits-all interfaces with limited potential to address the diversity of senior needs, there is a growing demand for approaches that support the systematic creation of adaptive, accessible app experiences. To this end, we present AdaptForge, a novel model-driven engineering (MDE) approach that enables advanced design-time adaptations of mobile application interfaces and behaviours tailored to the accessibility needs of senior users. AdaptForge uses two domain-specific languages (DSLs) to address age-related accessibility needs. The first model defines users' context-of-use parameters, while the second defines conditional accessibility scenarios and corresponding UI adaptation rules. These rules are interpreted by an MDE workflow to transform an app's original source code into personalised instances. We also report evaluations with professional software developers and senior end-users, demonstrating the feasibility and practical utility of AdaptForge.