Accessibility Mutation Testing of Android Applications
Henrique Neves da Silva, Sílvia Regina Vergílio, André Takeshi Endo · Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development · 2022
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.