How accessibility affects other quality attributes of software? A case study of GitHub.

Accessible design focuses on enabling as many people as possible to access software products and services, which has drawn extensive attention from software engineering researchers and developers. Currently, developers are improving the accessibility of software in a simple way, and researchers are putting much effort into investigating the characteristics of accessibility issues. No studies have explored the interaction of accessibility with other factors that affect software performance, although some researchers have found that these accessibility problems interact with other quality attributes (e.g., functionality , efficiency , and security) when they categorize accessibility issues. To fill this gap, we conducted the first comprehensive study to characterize symptoms, the violated standard, causes, and solutions for the accessibility issues along with quality attributes of software with 4,572 accessibility issues collected from GitHub. Specifically, we first investigated the symptoms of the interaction between the accessibility issues and software quality attributes. Second, we manually assessed accessibility issues where the interaction occurs to determine the violated standards. We then analyzed the causes of these interaction problems. Finally, we explored the commits that fix these accessibility issues along with quality attributes to find solutions. Our results indicate that: i) usability and functionality are the quality attributes that most frequently interact with accessibility, appearing more than 66% of the time; ii) 87% of the interaction issues violated Perceivable and Operable in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; iii) the main reason for these interaction problems is that UI Component Related (UCR) and Contrast Related (CR) issues show up more than 52% of the time. • Study the relationship between accessibility and attributes. • Summary how developers address accessibility problems. • Create a reliable dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]