AccessDroid: Detecting Screen Reader Accessibility Issues in Android Applications via Semantics Trees

Screen readers are essential for visually impaired users to access Android apps, but inadequate developer support often leads to semantic ambiguity or label missing. While prior work has focused primarily on label missing issues, semantic ambiguity remains underexplored. In this paper, we categorize screen reader accessibility issues into three types: semantics separation, semantics downshift, and semantics omission. Bootstrapped by semantics trees, we propose AccessDroid, a lightweight dynamic analysis approach that automatically detects screen reader accessibility issues in Android app pages and generates diagnostic reports. Applied to 361 runtime pages from 50 real-world Android apps, AccessDroid successfully detects 249 true semantics separation issues, 279 true semantics downshift issues, and 170 true semantics omission issues. On average, AccessDroid only spends 15 milliseconds per app page, and achieves a precision of 98.8% and a recall of 98.3%, significantly outperforming two baseline approaches.