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

Published: 01 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

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.

Highlights

Accessibility barriers can be inserted during development of mobile applications.
User interface design patterns are widely applied in software development.
Difficulties faced by software professionals are important to identify accessibility barriers.
Guidelines were proposed to avoid the problems of accessibility barriers in mobile development.

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  • (2024)Inequality in User Experience: Can Mobile User Interfaces that Help Sighted Users Create Barriers for Visually Challenged People?Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_3(19-30)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Antecedents of trustworthiness of social commerce platformsElectronic Commerce Research and Applications10.1016/j.elerap.2023.10132262:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2023
  • (2023)A systematic literature review of mobile application usability: addressing the design perspectiveUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-022-00903-w22:3(715-735)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023

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      Published In

      cover image Journal of Systems and Software
      Journal of Systems and Software  Volume 186, Issue C
      Apr 2022
      335 pages

      Publisher

      Elsevier Science Inc.

      United States

      Publication History

      Published: 01 April 2022

      Author Tags

      1. Accessibility
      2. Mobile application
      3. User interface design pattern
      4. Software engineering
      5. Gray literature review

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      View all
      • (2024)Inequality in User Experience: Can Mobile User Interfaces that Help Sighted Users Create Barriers for Visually Challenged People?Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_3(19-30)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
      • (2023)Antecedents of trustworthiness of social commerce platformsElectronic Commerce Research and Applications10.1016/j.elerap.2023.10132262:COnline publication date: 1-Nov-2023
      • (2023)A systematic literature review of mobile application usability: addressing the design perspectiveUniversal Access in the Information Society10.1007/s10209-022-00903-w22:3(715-735)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2023
      • (2023)UX Data Visualization: Supporting Software Professionals in Exploring Users’ Interaction DataEngineering Interactive Computer Systems. EICS 2023 International Workshops and Doctoral Consortium10.1007/978-3-031-59235-5_17(207-222)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2023

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