Accessibility Mutation Testing of Android Applications

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2022.2133

Keywords:

Mobile Apps, Mutation Testing, Accessibility

Abstract

Smart devices and their apps are present in many everyday activities and play an important role for people with some disabilities. However, making apps more accessible is still a challenge for developers. Automatically accessibility testing tools can help in this task but present some limitations. They produce reports on accessibility faults, which usually cover only a subset of the app because they are dependent on the test set available. In order to help in the improvement and/or assessment of test suites generated, as well as contribute to increasing the performance of accessibility testing tools, this work introduces a mutation testing approach. The approach includes a set of mutant operators derived from faults corresponding to the negation of the WCAG standard’s principles and success criteria. It also includes a process to analyse the mutants regarding the original app. Evaluation results with 7 open-source apps show the approach is applicable in practice and contributes to significantly improving the number of faults revealed by the test suites accompanying the apps.

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Published

2022-06-03

How to Cite

Neves da Silva, H., Regina Vergilio, S., & Takeshi Endo, A. (2022). Accessibility Mutation Testing of Android Applications. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development, 10, 8:1 – 8:11. https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2022.2133

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Section

Research Article