Preventing accessibility barriers: Guidelines for using user interface design patterns in mobile applications

Mobile applications play an important role in many aspects of life. It is essential to be aware of the software development approaches that can support the design of accessible applications. Their main goal is to ensure that the interactive applications are available to everyone, including people with disabilities, reduced skills, or momentarily induced impairments. This paper aims to identify the accessibility barriers that occur when using design patterns for building user interfaces of mobile apps and propose guidelines to prevent the problems most often encountered. We start by conducting a gray literature review in professional forums and blogs to reveal the difficulties developers face when using mobile user interface design patterns. We thus compiled a catalog which contains the descriptions of 9 user interface design patterns, the accessibility barriers linked to the use of each pattern and the guidelines that can be followed to prevent the problem of these barriers. We carried out an evaluation of the use of the catalog with 60 participants. Our results show that in most cases, the guidelines were correctly applied for the prototyping of mobile user interfaces. The findings also revealed the usefulness and ease-of-use of the guidelines from the perspective of the participants. (C) 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.