Accessibility evaluation of rich internet applications interface components for mobile screen readers

The growth in the use of mobile devices to use Websites has made it important to carefully consider how accessible they are to disabled users. In particular, the accessibility of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) poses serious challenges for visually impaired users employing screen readers. In this study, we performed an accessibility evaluation of a sample of 25 interface components from the Bootstrap front-end framework. The evaluation involved conformance analyses of the components with the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) 1.0 and expert manual evaluations of interfaces using Android's TalkBack and Apple iOS's VoiceOver screen readers. The results showed that the sampled interface components were in conformance with ARIA's techniques. However, in the empirical tests, 10 of 25 components in TalkBack and 4 of 25 components in VoiceOver, showed accessibility problems that can cause serious issues to visually impaired users on mobile devices. This shows that developers need to be aware of mobile devices' screen readers limitations even when implementing compliant interface components, and that more work needs to be done to provide more satisfactory interaction for RIA to be used by visually impaired users on mobile devices.