Accessibility Evaluation of IoT Android Mobile Companion Apps

Internet of Things (IoT) devices use mobile companion apps to configure, update, and proxy communications between devices, cloud endpoints, and users. However, to the best of our knowledge, their accessibility characteristics have received little study. Thus, we report the analysis results of 248 IoT companion apps. Our approach involves manual analysis based on the Accessibility Insights tool and reports on: the presence of contextual information (descriptions of controls, images, and text input), size of touch elements, and color contrast. Our primary findings are: (i) most apps have reasonable accessibility posture, but there exists a long tail of apps with significant problems, (ii) only two apps do not present any accessibility errors, and (iii) nearly 87% of apps in the corpus exhibit errors involving a lack of names and descriptions of elements and/or images. We further provide actionable recommendations to enhance the accessibility posture of the IoT android apps.