Accessibility in the mobile development industry in Brazil: Awareness, knowledge, adoption, motivations and barriers

Highlights

• Participants present moderate accessibility awareness.

• Few participants have good knowledge of accessibility standards and guidelines.

• Few participants fully consider accessibility in their projects.

• Few participants use any accessibility evaluation method to test their apps.

• Lack of requirements, time and training are usual barriers for accessibility adoption.

Abstract

Accessibility is a quality sub-characteristic intended to make software products accessible to a broad range of users, regardless of their physical, motor, intellectual or cognitive skills. Mobile accessibility has been on the spotlight recently due to the increasing shift towards mobile platforms. Thus, many advances have been made in this field when it comes to the development of assistive technologies, conception of well-documented accessibility guidelines and supporting tools. However, a general lack of accessibility in mobile applications has been observed in several studies. Researchers have conducted investigations to understand the same phenomenon in web development from the perspective of those involved in the development process, but studies concerning accessibility in the context of mobile applications are still scarce. This paper presents a survey conducted with 872 people involved in mobile application development in the Brazilian industry to gather information on their awareness, adoption, motivations and barriers to ensure digital accessibility. Results show that most participants have moderate accessibility awareness, but low levels of knowledge or adoption in practice. In addition, accessibility is usually not considered in their projects due to lack of requirements, time, training and focus on users with disabilities.

Introduction

People with disabilities may encounter several challenges in everyday activities, including the access to digital products or services that are badly designed. Considering that an estimated 15% of the world population has some type of disability (Organization and World Bank, 2011), accessibility plays an important role since it intends to promote user autonomy by removing barriers that may prevent people with disabilities to fully perceive, understand and operate digital products and services  (W3C, 2018b, W3C, 2018a, ISO, 2011, ISO, 2018).

In the software development context, accessibility is a non-functional requirement and a sub-characteristic of usability according to the product quality model defined by the ISO/IEC 25010:2011 (ISO, 2011). Accessibility is defined as the capacity of a software product or service to be used by a wide range of users with different characteristics and regardless of their physical, mental, motor or cognitive skills (W3C, 2018a, ISO, 2011, ISO, 2018). Although accessibility is mostly intended to address requirements related to users with disabilities, it should be considered a key quality attribute that contributes with the overall usability and quality of any software product or service (Gay et al., 2018).

Many advances have been made over the years to promote accessibility both in the software operation and production contexts, namely assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers, voice navigation and screen magnifiers) that can enhance user capabilities; the conception of accessibility standards and guidelines (e.g. W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to drive the implementation of accessible software systems; tool support for developing and evaluating the accessibility of software products (Silva et al., 2018); and specific legislation devised by many countries to enforce accessibility-related policies to make sure people with disabilities are not excluded (Lazar, 2019).

Web accessibility is perhaps the most notable case of digital accessibility since the WWW (World Wide Web) has been the most popular platform on which public or private companies share information and offer many of their services. However, mobile accessibility has also been on the spotlight recently, specially due to the increasing shift towards mobile platforms and the challenging nature of mobile devices when it comes to user interaction: small screens, large amount of possible hardware and software configurations, complex user interaction (e.g. gestures) and so forth.

Many studies have been conducted to investigate whether mobile applications developed and used in different contexts take accessibility requirements into account to be accessible to people with disabilities. Unfortunately, most studies have found a general lack of accessibility in mobile applications of different categories, sizes, complexities and popularity (Serra et al., 2015a, Eler et al., 2018, Yan and Ramachandran, 2019, Vendome et al., 2019, Alshayban et al., 2020, Acosta-Vargas et al., 2020). One question that arises in this context is “why do designers and developers not implement accessible products given that accessibility is an important quality attribute and many accessibility-related resources are available (e.g. assistive technology, guidelines, legislation and tools)?”.

This same phenomenon has also been noticed with web applications and some studies have been conducted to understand the accessibility awareness of people involved in web development and possible reasons for the general lack of accessibility (Lazar et al., 2004, Freire et al., 2008, Oliveira and Eler, 2017, Inal et al., 2019, Barzilai-Nahon et al., 2008, Putnam et al., 2012). Most studies reported the lack of awareness of people involved in the development process and several reasons why accessibility is not generally adopted in web application development, such as tight deadlines, lack of proper training, lack of proper tools, and so forth. Even though such type of investigation with respect to Web accessibility has been already explored, studies with people involved in mobile application development are still scarce.

Therefore, we set up a study to understand whether accessibility is addressed in mobile development projects. Specifically, we want to characterize the mobile application development industry with respect to the awareness and knowledge on digital accessibility of the people involved in the development process; to which extent accessibility practices and tools are adopted; the motivations that drive the development of accessible products; and the barriers that usually prevent accessibility to be properly addressed. As the mobile development industry worldwide is vast, we focused on a particular group, the Brazilian mobile development industry, to be able to collect data from a representative sample of the population. Brazil is the fifth most populous country and the 9th largest economy in the world. Furthermore, according to a study conducted by the Brazilian Association of Software Companies (ABES, 2018), Brazil is the 9th largest software market worldwide.

This paper presents and discusses the results of our study that was conducted based on the survey research method. For this investigation, we designed a Web-based questionnaire comprising 19 questions to collect data from people involved in mobile application development in Brazil. Participants were selected by a non-probabilistic sampling method and we were able to collect valid answers from 872 participants from all macro-regions of the country. Our results show that few participants have deep knowledge of accessibility standards and guidelines. Thus, accessibility is not fully addressed in most mobile development projects. In addition, participants seem to be motivated more by social conscience and personal reasons than organization and project demands. This is related to the most popular barriers mentioned by participants: lack of accessibility requirements, lack of time, lack of training and the lack of awareness that people with disabilities are numerous and also potential users of any digital product.

In addition, a cross analysis showed that the participants with higher levels of accessibility awareness, knowledge, adoption and evaluation, but still in low levels, usually work for larger organizations, have more experience in the software development process, work for private or public companies, or develop mobile applications for the iOS platform. For organizations of all sizes, the most frequent barrier to accessibility adoption is that it is not a requirement. Particularly, for micro and small companies, high cost and lack of training are the most prevalent barriers. For public organization, private companies and freelancers, the most mentioned barriers were that accessibility is not a requirement, lack of time and training.

This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents concepts related to digital accessibility. Section 3 gives an overview of previous studies conducted to characterize the context of mobile and web development with respect to accessibility. Section 4 describes the research method we selected to reach our results and conclusions. Section 5 presents the analysis of the data collected by our survey. Section 6 discusses the results of our study and compares our findings with related work. Section 7 presents the concluding remarks.