Customization guidelines for mobile applications from a universal design perspective.

The accessible ubiquity of mobile devices appeals to a variety of users, including people with disabilities. To adequately address this diversity of heterogeneous users, it would be necessary to design mobile applications guided by universal design. Universal mobile app design makes apps accessible to a variety of people, regardless of their characteristics, age or abilities. Due to technical limitations, applications cannot always inherit settings from Operating Systems. However, we can say that, on the one hand, operating systems move towards universal access, providing accessibility settings. On the other hand, mobile applications present an obstacle for this advance to happen. One way to mitigate the problem of low mobile app flexibility is to identify early in the mobile app development process a set of accessible customization guidelines that direct developers to include them in their apps. Still, many customizations are not specific to configuration requirements, and others are not designed based on universal design or through user input. This article presents, as a result of our study, a set of customization guidelines for implementing more flexible mobile applications. The guidelines also help to assess the degree of flexibility of existing mobile applications.