5 research outputs found
Digital Accessibility in Iran: An Investigation Focusing on Iran\u27s National Policies on Accessibility and Disability Support
Digital accessibility has become an important topic in the field of HCI, but when looking at accessibility on a global scale, we find that the representation of accessibility research is mostly centered in the Global North with countries that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Our paper explores digital accessibility in Iran, focusing exclusively on its national policies on accessibility. Iran is a non-WEIRD country located in the Global South, with no reports on its digital accessibility status from the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict). We found that there is not enough focus on accessibility in Iran\u27s regulations and we conclude our paper by recommending directions for improving this situation such as HCI and disability organizations in Iran cooperating with G3ict
Unblind Your Apps: Predicting Natural-Language Labels for Mobile GUI Components by Deep Learning
According to the World Health Organization(WHO), it is estimated that
approximately 1.3 billion people live with some forms of vision impairment
globally, of whom 36 million are blind. Due to their disability, engaging these
minority into the society is a challenging problem. The recent rise of smart
mobile phones provides a new solution by enabling blind users' convenient
access to the information and service for understanding the world. Users with
vision impairment can adopt the screen reader embedded in the mobile operating
systems to read the content of each screen within the app, and use gestures to
interact with the phone. However, the prerequisite of using screen readers is
that developers have to add natural-language labels to the image-based
components when they are developing the app. Unfortunately, more than 77% apps
have issues of missing labels, according to our analysis of 10,408 Android
apps. Most of these issues are caused by developers' lack of awareness and
knowledge in considering the minority. And even if developers want to add the
labels to UI components, they may not come up with concise and clear
description as most of them are of no visual issues. To overcome these
challenges, we develop a deep-learning based model, called LabelDroid, to
automatically predict the labels of image-based buttons by learning from
large-scale commercial apps in Google Play. The experimental results show that
our model can make accurate predictions and the generated labels are of higher
quality than that from real Android developers.Comment: Accepted to 42nd International Conference on Software Engineerin