Analysis of accessibility reviews published on the Google Play Store associated with visual disabilities

• Grant number: 22/10910-3
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Duration: April 01, 2023 - March 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Computer Science - Computing Methodologies and Techniques
• Principal Investigator: Marcelo Medeiros Eler
• Grantee: Marcelo Medeiros Eler
• Host Institution: Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades (EACH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Danilo Medeiros Eler

Abstract

User reviews published in app stores help organizations to fix bugs and to plan for new releases of their applications. Particularly, user reviews related to accessibility may be used to understand which barriers users face in real environments. Studies related to accessibility reviews have already been conducted and pointed out that few users report accessibility barriers and that few types of barriers are mentioned. However, such studies present some limitations: low representativeness of the sample, with apps of low popularity that have around 200 thousands reviews combined, and only analysis based on quantitative methods, which cannot explore the main concepts and their association in the data. Therefore, the goal of this research project is to characterize how accessibility is addressed in user reviews and that is associated with visual disabilities or eye conditions. Such a characterization will be conducted using both quantitative and qualitative analysis over a representative sample with around 180 million user reviews. In addition, we aim at investigating how accessibility reviews are handled by developers and organizations. The results of this research project will contribute to this field by: i) providing evidences of how accessibility barriers affect how users perceive, understand and operate mobile applications in real environments; ii) identifying the main accessibility barriers for each type of disability or element of the interface; iii) identifying the impact of accessibility barriers based on how users express themselves, sentiment analysis and scores associated with that review; iv) systematizing knowledge to provide evidences of the importance of following accessibility guidelines. (AU)