#A11yDev: Understanding Contemporary Software Accessibility Practices from Twitter Conversations

It is crucial to make software, with its ever-growing influence on everyday lives, accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Despite promoting software accessibility through government regulations, development guidelines, tools and frameworks, investigations reveal a marketplace of inaccessible web and mobile applications. To better understand the limitations of contemporary software industry in adopting accessibility practices, it is necessary to construct a holistic view that combines the perspectives of software practitioners, stakeholders and end users. In this paper, we collect 637 conversations from Twitter to synthesize and qualitatively analyze discussions posted about software accessibility. Our findings observe an active community that provides feedback on inaccessible software, shares personal accounts of development practices and advocates for inclusivity. By perceiving software accessibility from process, profession and people viewpoints, we present current conventions, challenges and possible resolutions with four emergent themes: cost and incentives, awareness and advocacy, technology and resources, and integration and inclusion.

An pictoral overview of the research design. The sequence diagram depicts the steps --- data collection, sampling and coding --- of our qualitative research, divided into two sections. The section on top shows steps for DC (Development Conversations), starting with keyword-based Tweet Search, followed by statistical sampling, and preliminary and parallel coding. The resulting data is then transferred to the section beneath: AC (Advocate Conversations). Advocate search is followed by a similar sequence as the previous section. Data from both sections are used in the Triangulation with Literature. Data from all three sections are moved to the analysis phase.

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