Developing Accessible Mobile Applications with Cross-Platform Development Frameworks

Abstract: 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.