What is it about?
Mobile apps are now an important part of everyday life, but accessibility barriers still make them difficult to use for many people with disabilities. This paper reviews research on how accessibility problems in mobile applications are detected and repaired. Based on 76 studies, we summarize the main types of accessibility issues, the methods used to detect them, and the approaches proposed to fix them. Our review provides a clearer overview of the field and may help support the development of more accessible mobile apps.
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Why is it important?
Mobile applications have become an indispensable part of daily life, yet accessibility barriers still prevent many users, especially older adults and people with disabilities, from fully and effectively using digital services. At the same time, research on mobile application accessibility is developing rapidly, with continued progress being made in areas such as automated detection and intelligent repair. Against this background, there is a pressing need for a systematic review to synthesize the current state of research in this field. Accordingly, this paper reviews research on the detection and repair of accessibility issues in mobile applications, providing a clearer picture of the field’s current status, recent advances, and remaining limitations. We hope this work will serve as a useful reference for future research and contribute to the development of more accessible mobile applications.
Perspectives
We hope this article helps more people see accessibility not as an optional feature, but as an important part of software quality. For us, this work was meaningful because it brought together research from different directions and showed both the progress that has been made and the challenges that still remain. More than anything else, we hope this review encourages further attention to mobile accessibility and supports the creation of apps that more people can use fairly and independently.
ZhenYu Liu
Beijing Union University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Accessibility Issue Detection and Repair in Mobile Applications: A Systematic Literature Review, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, April 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3809496.
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