Emerging Software Engineering Techniques for Stemming Software Accessibility Issues
Emerging Software Engineering Techniques for Stemming Software Accessibility Issues
The ability to use software with ease is important for everyone, especially for approximately 15% of the world population with disabilities. Even the simplest operations, taken for granted by non-disabled users, can be daunting tasks for disabled users. In this talk, I will first discuss the prevalent nature of software accessibility issues, particularly in the context of mobile apps, and the shortcomings of existing solutions in detecting these issues. I will then discuss several new techniques developed in my lab to improve the fidelity with which accessibility issues are detected and the means through which some of these issues can be automatically repaired. I will highlight some of our key experimental findings as well as the lessons learned in the context of applying these solutions together with disabled users in evaluating the accessibility of mobile apps. I will conclude the talk with reflections on our work and avenues of future research.
About the speaker
Professor, University of California Irvine
Sam Malek is a Professor in the Informatics Department within the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He is also the Director of the Software Engineering and Analysis Laboratory. From 2018 to 2022, he was the Director of the Institute for Software Research. Malek's general research interests are in the field of software engineering, and to date his focus has spanned the areas of software analysis and testing, mobile computing, security, software architecture, and accessible computing. Malek received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Southern California and his B.S. degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. He has received numerous awards for his research contributions, including the ACM SIGSOFT test-of-time award (2020) and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2013). Malek is currently on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, and Springer Journal of Computing.
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