UC Irvine

Accessibility is a critical software quality attribute for 15% of the world's population with disabilities. As mobile apps become increasingly important for users with disabilities, the demand for accessible mobile applications is growing. Manual accessibility testing, which involves assistive technologies, is a high-fidelity methodology that ensures the accessibility quality of shipped apps. However, implementing this approach can be arduous and demands a thorough understanding of various accessibility aspects. In addition, current automatic mobile accessibility testing tools primarily focus on identifying violations of predefined guidelines, usually overlooking how users with disabilities use mobile apps via assistive technologies. This failure to consider assistive technologies while evaluating an app's accessibility can result in missing important cues.

To address this issue, this thesis proposes a record-and-replay technique encompassing recording developers' touch gestures, replaying the equivalent actions using Android TalkBack, and generating a comprehensive visualized report incorporating different interaction modes offered by TalkBack. The evaluation of this technique on existing market apps demonstrated that the proposed technique offers valuable assistance to developers in detecting complex accessibility issues at various stages of the development process.