When Can Accessibility Help?: An Exploration of Accessibility Feature Recommendation on Mobile Devices
This work addresses the issue of underutilized accessibility features for older adults and people with disabilities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing recommendation approaches.
The paper tackles the problem of low awareness and adoption of built-in accessibility features on mobile devices, particularly among older adults, by developing and testing four prototype recommenders that show automated recommendation could help users find beneficial features.
Numerous accessibility features have been developed and included in consumer operating systems to provide people with a variety of disabilities additional ways to access computing devices. Unfortunately, many users, especially older adults who are more likely to experience ability changes, are not aware of these features or do not know which combination to use. In this paper, we first quantify this problem via a survey with 100 participants, demonstrating that very few people are aware of built-in accessibility features on their phones. These observations led us to investigate accessibility recommendation as a way to increase awareness and adoption. We developed four prototype recommenders that span different accessibility categories, which we used to collect insights from 20 older adults. Our work demonstrates the need to increase awareness of existing accessibility features on mobile devices, and shows that automated recommendation could help people find beneficial accessibility features.