With the ubiquitous use of mobile applications, it is paramount that they are accessible, so they can empower all users, including those with different needs. Determining if an app is accessible implies conducting an accessibility evaluation. While accessibility evaluations have been thoroughly studied in the web domain, there are still many open questions when evaluating mobile applications. This paper investigates mobile accessibility evaluation methodologies. We conducted four studies, including an examination of accessibility reports from European Member-states, interviews with accessibility experts, manual evaluations, and usability tests involving users. Our investigations have uncovered significant limitations in current evaluation methods, suggesting that the absence of authoritative guidelines and standards, similar to what exists for the web, but tailored specifically to mobile devices, hampers the effectiveness of accessibility evaluation and monitoring activities. Based on our findings, we present a set of recommendations aimed at improving the evaluation methodologies for assessing mobile applications’ accessibility.

Many Virtual Reality (VR) locomotion techniques have been proposed, but those explored for and with blind people are often custom-made or require specialized equipment. Consequently, it is unclear how popular techniques can support blind people’s VR locomotion, blocking access to most VR experiences. We implemented three popular techniques — Arm Swinging, Linear Movement (joystick-based steering), and Point & Teleport — with minor adaptations for accessibility. We conducted a study with 14 blind participants consisting of navigation tasks with these techniques and a semi-structured interview. We found no differences in overall performance (e.g., completion time), but contrasting preferences. Findings highlight the challenges and advantages of each technique and participants’ strategies. We discuss, among others, how augmenting the techniques enabled blind people to navigate in VR, the greater control of movement of Arm Swinging, the simplicity and familiarity of Linear Movement, and the potential for efficiency and for scanning the environment of Point & Teleport.

User-generated content plays a key role in social networking, allowing a more active participation, socialisation, and collaboration among users. In particular, media content has been gaining a lot of ground, allowing users to express themselves through different types of formats such as images, GIFs and videos. The majority of this growing type of online visual content remains inaccessible to a part of the population, in particular for those who have a visual disability, despite available tools to mitigate this source of exclusion. We sought to understand how people are perceiving this type of online content in their networks and how support tools are being used. To do so, we conducted a user study, with 258 social network users through an online questionnaire, followed by interviews with 20 of them – 7 blind users and 13 sighted users. Results show how the different approaches being employed by major platforms may not be sufficient to address this issue properly. Our findings reveal that users are not always aware of the possibility and the benefits of adopting accessible practices. From the general perspectives of end-users experiencing accessible practices, concerning barriers encountered, and motivational factors, we also discuss further approaches to create more user engagement and awareness.

Abstract The constant emergence of new resources and interaction possibilities brought by web 2.0 brings a constant urge of keeping in track how those new elements can affect the interaction of people with disabilities and how far current re-search has managed to address existing problems. This paper presents the results of an empirical study designed to gather navigation barriers affecting blind people when interacting with some widely used web widgets – such as Popup windows, Auto Suggest Lists, etc. The aim is to correlate those barriers with WCAG 2.0 and ARIA guidelines. From this point of view, it is possible to determine which barriers are being covered by current guide-lines and which ones are still on the wild. As conducting users’ evaluations are really costly, the more barriers can be eliminated beforehand, the more useful those sessions can be.