ScaleFix: An Automated Repair of UI Scaling Accessibility Issues in Android Applications

Abstract

Many people with disabilities often struggle to interact with small UI content or comprehend small text displayed on mobile app user interfaces (UIs). To overcome these difficulties, they rely on scaling assistive services to adjust and increase the size of UI content. Unfortunately, recent studies have shown that a large number of mobile apps are not compatible with these services, leading to inconsistencies that can distort the layout of the UIs of these apps. These distortions make it even more troublesome for people with disabilities to use these mobile apps, which defeats the purpose of these scaling assistive services. Existing techniques are limited in terms of repairing these issues. In this paper, we present ScaleFix, a novel approach to automatically repair UI scaling accessibility issues in mobile apps. ScaleFix is the first-ever technique to repair such issues. The evaluation of ScaleFix on real-world Android apps demonstrated its ability to effectively repair UI scaling accessibility issues. Additionally, in a user study with individuals affected by these issues, the results demonstrated that ScaleFix was able to improve the accessibility of mobile UIs without negatively impacting the readability or aesthetics of the UI.

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