Study of Accessibility Guidelines of Mobile Applications

With the increased ubiquity of mobile devices around the world, it is imperative to ensure that these devices and their applications (apps) are accessible to users with disabilities. Although design style guides are undergoing a paradigm shift with the promotion of 'mobile-first' ideology, we have yet to witness a concrete step being taken towards the establishment of universal guidelines for mobile app accessibility. To address this issue, we compile an exhaustive list of guidelines to gauge mobile app accessibility. We present a mobile-specific framework to categorize the guidelines. We then underline the importance of these clearly defined guidelines by putting the most popular 25 apps from the Google Play Store under their lens. The results indicate low rates of violations of accessibility guidelines at the system level, and a high rate of violations at design and content levels. We highlight the most and the least violated guidelines. We discuss in detail the overall accessibility of evaluated apps and identified patterns in violations of established rules.