  Smartphones are a crucial aspect of routine life in the modern world, and
viewing information graphics such as charts becomes common practice for many
unassuming tasks. However, for the vision impaired, accessing graphical
material presents many difficulties. Android smartphones usually come
preinstalled with Google Talkback as a default screen-reader, which attempts to
cater for the visually impaired by providing supplementary auditory information
when interfacing with supported applications. Still, the crux of this situation
is that screen-readers rely on developers correctly implementing the required
accessibility guidelines for UI elements, such as charts. Unfortunately,
according to the empirical study, more than 88% of the charts found in
real-world Android applications are inaccessible to a vision-impaired user,
contributing to the wider accessibility issues faced by vision impaired users
of smartphones. These accessibility issues can be attributed to a knowledge gap
in considering possible disabilities for users, and time costs for developers.
To overcome these challenges, this study proposes CAM (Chart Accessibility
Module), which aims to reduce time and bridge the knowledge gap required to
implement chart accessibility. CAM has two steps, generating chart summary
using raw data and feeding it to the screen-reader using the Android
Accessibility API for MPAndroidChart library. The user study results show that
CAM significantly reduces difficulty and time taken to implement accessibility
for application developers.

Human-Computer Interaction;Software Engineering