research-article

Accessible smart cities?: Inspecting the accessibility of Brazilian municipalities' mobile applications

Authors:

Lucas Pedroso Carvalho,

Bruno Piovesan Melchiori Peruzza,

Flávia Santos,

Lucas Pereira Ferreira,

André Pimenta FreireAuthors Info & Claims

IHC '16: Proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3033701.3033718

Published: 04 October 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The use of interactive technologies to aid in the implementation of smart cities has a significant potential to support disabled users in performing their activities as citizens. In this study, we present an investigation of the accessibility of a sample of 10 mobile Android™ applications of Brazilian municipalities, two from each of the five big geographical regions of the country, focusing especially on users with visual disabilities. The results showed that many of the applications were not in accordance with accessibility guidelines, with an average of 57 instances of violations and an average of 11.6 different criteria violated per application. The main problems included issues like not addressing labelling of non-textual content, headings, identifying user location, colour contrast, enabling users to interact using screen reader gestures, focus visibility and lack of adaptation of text contained in image. Although the growth in mobile applications for has boosted the possibilities aligned with the principles of smart cities, there is a strong need for including accessibility in the design of such applications in order for disabled people to benefit from the potential they can have for their lives.

References

[1]

Android. 2016. Android Accessibility Development Guide. (2016). Available online at http://bit.ly/1DCieuZ. Last accessed 10th August 2016.

[2]

Apple. 2016. Accessibility Programming Guide for iOS. (2016). Available online at http://apple.co/2aMKbIl. Last accessed 10th August 2016.

[3]

Ben Caldwell, Michael Cooper, Loretta Guarino Reid, and Gregg Vanderheiden. 2008. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. (2008). Available online at https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/. Last accessed 12th June 2016.

[4]

Sarah Chiti and Barbara Leporini. 2012. Accessibility of Android-based Mobile Devices: A Prototype to Investigate Interaction with Blind Users. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs - Volume Part II (ICCHP'12). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 607--614.

Digital Library

[5]

Raphael Clegg-Vinell, Christopher Bailey, and Voula Gkatzidou. 2014. Investigating the Appropriateness and Relevance of Mobile Web Accessibility Guidelines. In Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A'14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 38, 4 pages.

Digital Library

[6]

Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. 2016. (2016). Available online at http://www.kantarworldpanel.com/global/smartphoneos- market-share/. Last accessed 12th June 2016.

[7]

D. López de Ipiña, B. Klein, S. Vanhecke, and J. Pérez-Velasco. 2013. Towards Ambient Assisted Cities and Citizens. In Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops (WAINA), 2013 27th International Conference on. 1343--1348.

Digital Library

[8]

Kotaro Hara, Vicki Le, and Jon Froehlich. 2013. Combining Crowdsourcing and Google Street View to Identify Street-level Accessibility Problems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 631--640.

Digital Library

[9]

International Standards Organization. 1998. ISO 9241-11 - Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs)-Part 11: guidance on usability. (1998).

[10]

Shaun K. Kane, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Richard E. Ladner. 2011. Usable Gestures for Blind People: Understanding Preference and Performance. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 413--422.

Digital Library

[11]

Barbara Leporini, Maria Claudia Buzzi, and Marina Buzzi. 2012. Interacting with mobile devices via VoiceOver: usability and accessibility issues. In Proceedings of the 24th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference. ACM, 339--348.

Digital Library

[12]

Lesley J. McIntyre and Vicki L. Hanson. 2014. Buildings and Users with Visual Impairment: Uncovering Factors for Accessibility Using BIT-Kit. In Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 59--66.

Digital Library

[13]

Donald McMillan, Arvid Engström, Airi Lampinen, and Barry Brown. 2016. Data and the City. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2933--2944.

Digital Library

[14]

Donald McNeill. 2015. Global firms and smart technologies: IBM and the reduction of cities. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, 4 (2015), 562--574.

[15]

S. Mirri, C. Prandi, and P. Salomoni. 2016. Personalizing Pedestrian Accessible way-finding with mPASS. In 2016 13th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications Networking Conference (CCNC). 1119--1124.

[16]

Taewoo Nam and Theresa A. Pardo. 2011. Conceptualizing Smart City with Dimensions of Technology, People, and Institutions. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times (dg.o '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 282--291.

Digital Library

[17]

Paolo Neirotti, Alberto de Marco, Anna Corinna Cagliano, Giulio Mangano, and Francesco Scorrano. 2014. Current trends in Smart City initiatives: Some stylised facts. Cities 38 (2014), 25--36.

[18]

International Standards Organization. 2008. ISO 9241-171 - Ergonomics of human-system interaction - Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility. (2008).

[19]

Kyudong Park, Taedong Goh, and Hyo-Jeong So. 2014. Toward Accessible Mobile Application Design: Developing Mobile Application Accessibility Guidelines for People with Visual Impairment. In Proceedings of HCI Korea (HCIK '15). Hanbit Media, Inc., South Korea, 31--38. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2729485.2729491

Digital Library

[20]

Lara Schibelsky G. Piccolo, Ewerton M. de Menezes, and Bruno de Campos Buccolo. 2011. Developing an Accessible Interaction Model for Touch Screen Mobile Devices: Preliminary Results. In Proceedings of the 10th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems and the 5th Latin American Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (IHC+CLIHC '11). Brazilian Computer Society, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 222--226. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2254436.2254474

Digital Library

[21]

Ornella Plos and Stéphanie Buisine. 2006. Universal Design for Mobile Phones: A Case Study. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1229--1234.

Digital Library

[22]

Jathan Sadowski and Frank A Pasquale. 2015. The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city. First Monday 20, 7 (2015).

[23]

Leandro Coelho Serra, Lucas Pedroso Carvalho, Lucas Pereira Ferreira, Jorge Belimar Silva Vaz, and André Pimenta Freire. 2015. Accessibility Evaluation of E-Government Mobile Applications in Brazil. 6th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion. Procedia Computer Science 67 (2015), 348--357.

[24]

Rayoung Yang, Sangmi Park, Sonali R. Mishra, Zhenan Hong, Clint Newsom, Hyeon Joo, Erik Hofer, and Mark W. Newman. 2011. Supporting Spatial Awareness and Independent Wayfinding for Pedestrians with Visual Impairments. In The Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 27--34.

Digital Library

Cited By

Da Costa Nunes ESilva PSouza RMonteiro I(2024)Investigating Accessibility at the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702098(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702038.3702098
Perinello LGaggi O(2024)Accessibility of Mobile User Interfaces using Flutter and React Native2024 IEEE 21st Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454681(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454681
Da Costa Nunes ERibeiro GMonteiro IGonçalves E(2023)Digital Accessibility at the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC): An Updated Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3638067.3638075(1-15)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638067.3638075
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Accessible smart cities?: Inspecting the accessibility of Brazilian municipalities' mobile applications
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

Recommendations

Towards Ubiquitous Accessibility Digital Maps for Smart Cities
SIGSPATIAL '17: Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems

Designing indoor and outdoor spaces to become accessible for people with disabilities is of paramount importance. Accessibility leads to improvements in human rights and business outcomes; due to inclusion of a broader range of the population. For ...
Making Smart and Accessible Cities
SMARTGREENS 2016: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Smart Cities and Green ICT Systems

Improving citizens' quality of life is one of the main goals of Smart Cities development. Accessibility of urban public spaces absolutely determines the living conditions for people. Technology provides new opportunities of autonomy for an increasing ...
Are Mobile Apps Usable and Accessible for Senior Citizens in Smart Cities?
Human Aspects of IT for the Aged Population. Design for the Elderly and Technology Acceptance
Abstract
The population in cities is expected to exponentially grow by 2050, and so is the world population aged 65 and over. This has increased the efforts to improve citizens’ quality of life in urban areas by offering smarter and more efficient IT-based ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences

IHC '16: Proceedings of the 15th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

October 2016

431 pages

ISBN:9781450352352

DOI:10.1145/3033701

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

In-Cooperation

SBC: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação
CNPq: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecn
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction
CGIBR: Comite Gestor da Internet no Brazil

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 04 October 2016

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Conference

IHC '16

IHC '16: XV Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems

October 4 - 7, 2016

São Paulo, Brazil

Acceptance Rates

IHC '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 58 of 158 submissions, 37%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 331 of 973 submissions, 34%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

17
Total Citations
View Citations
334
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)23
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 28 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Da Costa Nunes ESilva PSouza RMonteiro I(2024)Investigating Accessibility at the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3702038.3702098(1-18)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3702038.3702098
Perinello LGaggi O(2024)Accessibility of Mobile User Interfaces using Flutter and React Native2024 IEEE 21st Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC)10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454681(1-6)Online publication date: 6-Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC51664.2024.10454681
Da Costa Nunes ERibeiro GMonteiro IGonçalves E(2023)Digital Accessibility at the Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC): An Updated Systematic Literature ReviewProceedings of the XXII Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3638067.3638075(1-15)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638067.3638075
Islam MPorter DBillah S(2023)A Probabilistic Model and Metrics for Estimating Perceived Accessibility of Desktop Applications in Keystroke-Based Non-Visual InteractionsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581400(1-20)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581400
Pedroso Carvalho LRibeiro de Souza JOliveira Prates RPimenta Freire A(2023)SIM-SR—Semiotic Inspection Method Mediated by Screen Reader: Analysing the Benefits of Bringing Communicability to the Accessibility Evaluation TableInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwad02335:2(276-300)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2023
https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwad023
Fok RZhong MRoss AFogarty JWobbrock J(2022)A Large-Scale Longitudinal Analysis of Missing Label Accessibility Failures in Android AppsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502143(1-16)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3502143
de Oliveira GOliveira Ode Abreu Sde Bettio RFreire A(2022)Opportunities and accessibility challenges for open-source general-purpose home automation mobile applications for visually disabled usersMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-022-12074-081:8(10695-10722)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-12074-0
Fernández-Díaz ECorreia MMatos N(2021)Portuguese and Spanish DMOs’ Accessibility Apps and WebsitesJournal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research10.3390/jtaer1604005016:4(874-899)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2021
https://doi.org/10.3390/jtaer16040050
Ross A(2020)An epidemiology-inspired, large-scale analysis of mobile app accessibilityACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3386402.3386408(1-1)Online publication date: 3-Mar-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386402.3386408
Ross AZhang XFogarty JWobbrock J(2020)An Epidemiology-inspired Large-scale Analysis of Android App AccessibilityACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/334879713:1(1-36)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3348797
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents