AccessMDD: An MDD approach for generating accessible mobile applications

Abstract

Mobile devices have become popular, and their use for daily activities has spread around the world. A wide variety of mobile applications aims to meet the daily needs of diverse people, such as transportation and commerce. Meanwhile, mobile accessibility is a worldwide concern. Accessibility is a requirement for any user to interact with software. For example, about 25% of the Brazilian population declares themselves as having some disability. Although traditional mobile software development approaches indicate that native development achieves higher computing performances, this implies high-priced development, difficult maintainability, and low accessibility for the interface components. Many mobile applications still lack accessibility, and people with disabilities may find barriers when interacting with them. We understand that Model-Driven Development (MDD) and cross-platform mobile development, together, may help to solve this gap and facilitate the development of more accessible mobile applications. Our goal is to create an MDD solution that generates accessible mobile applications. We place our focus on blind and low vision users to direct the development of our solution. In this work, we investigate MDD approaches for mobile development and appoint recommendations for accessibility in the user interface components. To achieve this goal, we developed AccessMDD, an approach to stimulate developerś awareness of accessibility recommendations. This approach supports the inclusion of accessibility requirements and generates accessible user interfaces for mobile apps.