Accessibility in Native Mobile Applications for Users with Disabilities: A Scoping Review

Abstract

The objective of this scoping review is to characterize the current scenario of mobile applications considering accessibility issues for people with cognitive, motor, and sensory disabilities. Nowadays, mobile devices have grown exponentially, giving way to new ways of relating, managing, and working. In this context, mobile devices seek to democratize access to knowledge on different topics; however, the application of accessibility guidelines is neglected. The reviewers extracted the most relevant articles published between 2000 and 2020 from the ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. In this scoping review, the PRISMA-ScR checklist was used to extract scientific articles; Cohen’s kappa coefficient = 0.4117 was applied, which implies moderate concordance of reviewers; 22 primary studies were extracted from a total of 211. The results obtained in this research suggest applying WCAG 2.1 in mobile applications to achieve an adequate level of accessibility. Future work suggests designing review tools that include machine learning based on artificial intelligence algorithms.

Keywords

• accessibility
• application
• literature
• mobile
• review
• scoping