Developing Accessible Mobile Applications with Cross-Platform Development Frameworks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Mascetti, Sergio, Ducci, Mattia, Cantù, Niccoló, Pecis, Paolo, Ahmetovic, Dragan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2020
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author Mascetti, Sergio
Ducci, Mattia
Cantù, Niccoló
Pecis, Paolo
Ahmetovic, Dragan
author_facet Mascetti, Sergio
Ducci, Mattia
Cantù, Niccoló
Pecis, Paolo
Ahmetovic, Dragan
contents This contribution investigates how cross-platform development frameworks (CPDF) support the creation of mobile applications that are accessible to people with visual impairments through screen readers. We first systematically analyze screen-reader APIs available in native iOS and Android, and we examine whether and at what level the same functionalities are available in two popular CPDF: Xamarin and React Native. This analysis unveils that there are many functionalities shared between native iOS and Android APIs, but most of them are not available in React Native or Xamarin. In particular, not even all basic APIs are exposed by the examined CPDF. Accessing the unavailable APIs is still possible, but it requires an additional effort by the developers who need to know native APIs and to write platform specific code, hence partially negating the advantages of CPDF. To address this problem, we consider a representative set of native APIs that cannot be directly accessed from React Native and Xamarin and show sample implementations for accessing them.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2005_06875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Developing Accessible Mobile Applications with Cross-Platform Development Frameworks
Mascetti, Sergio
Ducci, Mattia
Cantù, Niccoló
Pecis, Paolo
Ahmetovic, Dragan
Software Engineering
Programming Languages
This contribution investigates how cross-platform development frameworks (CPDF) support the creation of mobile applications that are accessible to people with visual impairments through screen readers. We first systematically analyze screen-reader APIs available in native iOS and Android, and we examine whether and at what level the same functionalities are available in two popular CPDF: Xamarin and React Native. This analysis unveils that there are many functionalities shared between native iOS and Android APIs, but most of them are not available in React Native or Xamarin. In particular, not even all basic APIs are exposed by the examined CPDF. Accessing the unavailable APIs is still possible, but it requires an additional effort by the developers who need to know native APIs and to write platform specific code, hence partially negating the advantages of CPDF. To address this problem, we consider a representative set of native APIs that cannot be directly accessed from React Native and Xamarin and show sample implementations for accessing them.
title Developing Accessible Mobile Applications with Cross-Platform Development Frameworks
topic Software Engineering
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.06875