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tags:: #zotero title:: @TOSEM-2025-0885 item-type:: webpage access-date:: 2025-11-04T21:29:58Z original-title:: TOSEM-2025-0885 url:: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tosem?DOWNLOAD=TRUE&PARAMS=xik_A6HrXFapMx4UPvbFpZJ9Bp5ACAjbXJdr8Tqfj7rfGcRb16MAr5sRcLvKm8uq1i5BLxiFUmZ4tUsb1gnpp7UZSr1qnv6jF4uSH4doDZxpnmVjPXPSJe6oq5tkRc58UdNCqRhqHhxfSeS2exS5FTRbqhGHMLaFJTMkkifhr7VAsSnpHEWH7XSggqbRqZxcnDjBp619F links:: Local library, Web library
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Attachments
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Notes
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I'm reviewing a research paper and I took the following notes:
Annotazioni
(18/11/2025, 06:59:04)
“Visual Impairments w” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 1)
“visual impairments” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 2)
“review on how MDE addresses accessibility for vision impairments.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 2)
“30 primary studies met the inclusion criteria.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 2)
“we report the results of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify the current state-of-the-art of addressing accessibility needs with MDE based on the concrete example of vision impairments.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“To give an example from practice: When selecting the menu for lunch or reading a bus schedule, users with low vision or blind users have specific requirements for the technical applications used, e.g., showing larger text sizes and having more contrast for people with low vision or enabling the reading of texts with screen readers for blind users.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“engineering of socio-technical systems” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“For people with visual impairments, inclusive GUIs facilitate equal access to information, promote independence, and social inclusion.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“Accessibility as a non-functional requirement, however, is challenging to realize in a software system because its effects are widespread across the entire system” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“On top of MDE [24], low-code development platforms have moved MDE from research to practice, providing methods for supporting additional stakeholder groups [5, 23]. Even though” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“how is it used to improve applications for visually impaired users?” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 3)
“arch focused on visual impairments only.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 4)
“The objective of this research is to identify those studies that address a combination of both, or more specifically, the design and implementation of software systems that address the needs of people with visual impairments using MDE methods.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 5)
“evaluation of the capabilities of approaches to capture accessibility (visual impairment) needs,” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 6) I expect to see some precise definition of visual impairment
“advantages offered by the model-driven development of accessible software?” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 6)
“disadvantages in the context of model-driven development of accessible software?” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 6)
“Which trends exist” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“What visual impairments” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“How” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“work” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“How” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“evaluated” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“challenges” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 7)
“3.4 Study Selection Procedure” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 8)
“The search query was tested and refined with a series of pilot runs” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 8)
“Table 1. Quality Assessment (QA) scoring system” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 9) I guess such quality critiera have been defined by the authors and not inherited from other existing works. In this respect, I would spend just a dedicated paragraph to explain how they have been defined. If a structured process was followed by the authors.
“Our initial literature search was performed in February 2023 and repeated in January 2024 and we performed an additional forward snowballing in October 2025” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 9) Mmmm this is suspicious. It means that the paper has been resubmitted several time, nothing wrong. Just saying that it's probable that the paper has been subject of different revisions.
“Research into MDE approaches that address visual impairment needs started late, trends downward, and has yielded a low output to date.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 11) Why is it important to know? The fact the interest around the topic has decreased over the year, what does it mean? Is it an indication of something? is it because the problem is difficult to be addressed with MDE technologies? is it because if completely out of scope for MDE, what else? Having only these numbers is not relevant to me. Some qualitative discussion is needed in my opinion.
“The impact in the MDE community to date is low. None of the selected studies appeared in a high ranked MDE venue. Generally low citation counts indicate that most of the studies did not create interest beyond a small community of collaborating author.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 12) Why? Then? See my previous comment.
“bstract nature of these keywords indicates that - just like the other 24 studies - these 6 primary studies do not consider the true nature and complexities of visual impairments in detail. Finally only one study (S17) provides basic definitions for common visual impairments” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 13)
“The large majority of studies provides generic approaches improving accessibility without studying human-centric aspects of visual impairments in detail. We argue in favor of considering accessibility and in the concrete context of this SLR, visual impairments, as first-class citizens and consider them beyond the technical domain when addressing it.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 13)
“Most primary studies consider different functional roles to represent anticipated users of their MDE-based approach, and identify beneficiaries of improved accessibility. However, they often overlook or briefly address the specific needs of these audiences, neglecting the human and social aspects of socio-technical systems. This shortcoming may hinder understanding of how effectively the tools address accessibility needs or whether they tackle real-world accessibility issues.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 14) What's the usage of modeling techniques and tools in the MDE-based approaches that have been analyzed?
“accessibility challenges” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 15) What does it mean in practive? What do the author expect by using MDE for deising and impleenting software that mitigate visual impariment issues? it is important to clarify what is the ideal usage of MDE (if any) that authors expected to see.
“(see Figure 4),” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 15) This figure is too far, it's page 29, whereas it is referred in the text the first time at page 15.
“urprisingly, none of the DSLs modeled accessibility aspects explicitly, but rather focused on the basic structure of user interfaces.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 19)
“these solutions are not reusable for other MDE projects as the detailed accessibility requirements, modeling requirements and adaptation rules are provided by giving some examples only.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 20) What does it mean reusable solutions for the considered problem that is very specific to the particular case/application/context/user, isn't it?
“accessibility guidelines should be validated and tested” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 21) How? What would you exect?
“Lack of awareness and attention by developers as well as insufficient tools and methods are the most frequently used aspects to motivate research work.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 23)
“Only one [6] of 30 studies took a human-centric approach and motivated the presented research with real-world impact for disadvantaged people.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 23)
“Only one study directly aimed to help disadvantaged users, and just two considered the needs of visually impaired users” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 23)
“By creating high-level abstractions of software, these methods provide a comprehensive way to address accessibility requirements while reducing complexity.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 23) This is not obvious. We might reduce the development complexity by means of MDE methods. However, the link with accessibility requirements is not direct.
“The most common are limited evaluation and scope,” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“ack of real-user testing,” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“low applicability to real-world projects.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“(1) Introducing accessibility:” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“incorporation of accessibility features into the user interface” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“(2) Improving accessibility coverage” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“(3) Technical / maintenance challenges” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“benefits of concepts and methodologies for the model-based development of accessible applications.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 25)
“The large majority of studies focused on open gaps and challenges from the accessibility perspective, not from the MDE perspective. We see this focus as one of the reasons why none of the primary studies were published at main MDE venues” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 26) I can understand this.
“analysis of the 30 selected primary studies reveals several shortcomings and areas where further research is needed.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 26)
“While the reviewed studies offer valuable insights and innovative methodologies, certain limitations and ambiguities in their approaches restrict reproducibility and broader applicability to related use cases.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 26)
“By addressing the identified issues and building on existing methodologies, future research can contribute to more robust, transparent, and generalizable solutions.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 26) There are many sentences like this that is vague, too abstract and not to the point. Robust with respect what? Whta aspect is requiring transparency?
“diverse ßhuman” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Limitation 2: High-level Description of Approaches. A significant number of studies (S4, S10, S15, S18, S20, S21, S28, S27)” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Limitation 3: Generalisability and Reproducibility of Approaches.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Limitation 1: Measuring Achieved Accessibility.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Limitation 4: Evaluation with Key Target User Groups.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“The studies often either discuss the benefits for the user (e.g. enhanced user experience) or the benefits for the developer (e.g. higher efficiency during development).” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Limitation 5: Lack of MDE Details and Reusability.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 27)
“Evaluate guideline coverage for vision-related needs and include visually impaired participants early in the development” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“Limitation 6: Accessibility as a Prerequisite Competence. T” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“Although the presented approaches include many automation aspects, all of them still rely highly on the developer to provide accessibility expertise” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“automation of accessibility related tasks in the development process” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28) What do you mean? It's not clear on how this can be possible, considering that are several impairement situations, cases etc. Addressing all the them automatically by means of some MDE approach is not clear,.
“Limitation 7: Coverage of Accessibility Needs and Guidelines.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“Integrate visual impairment requirements with generic requirements.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“Map visual impairment requirements to commonly used requirements modeling approaches” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 28)
“Reuse design models” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 29) The reuse aspects are mentioned in several parts of the paper, even though it is not clear to what extent this is possible. As mentioned in one of my comments above, applications can be different, in different contexts and different users. What could you reuse? What are the envisioned reusability possibilities?
“Develop or extend modeling languages to cover needs of visually impaired users.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 29)
“Evaluate and enhance or develop modeling languages to better represent specific accessibility needs, i.e., annotating color-independent interactions, providing alternative modalities, tagging semantic description of UI elements, or dependencies on screen readers, in software design. By adapting and extending existing modeling languages, developers can more effectively articulate and document accessibility requirements within their designs” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 29)
“Leverage genAI to create impairment-focused models and represent different levels of vision loss.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 29) This comes out of the blue!
“Provide reusable RTE components that incorporate vision accessibility” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 30) See my previous comment about reusability.
“Develop reusable generators and templates incorporating the visually impaired needs.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 30) This is very related to one of my previous comment about reusability concerns
“Create and refine reusable transformation rules for covering sight-related accessibility features by default.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 30) Idem, see my previous comment. This is the main concern of this work!
“While accessibility needs for visually impaired persons are often overlooked in developing socio-technical systems, an MDE approach should provide the needed developer support to incorporate them systematically and consistently throughout the complete application. This study presents a systematic literature review of 30 primary studies on the application of model-driven engineering for visual impairments selected from an initial pool of 447 papers. We have analyzed existing trends regarding timing, output, impact, and nature of the reported approaches, and what visual impairments they address. We investigated the MDE approaches and their development steps and evaluations in detail, and gave an overview of the reported strengths, limitations, gaps, and challenges. Key findings are that most studies to date operate at a high abstraction level, mainly rely on WCAG, and rarely provide reproducible pipelines or working software artifacts.” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 31)
“Only a small number of studies provide concrete modeling approaches for accessibility requirements,” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 31)
“functioning implementations, and evaluations with visually impaired end users. This limits reuse, hinders independent verification of the results and constrains the impact for practical adoption. Only a few approaches target MDE methods, languages, transformations, code generators, or further tooling as the object of innovation and rather use MDE as an instrument. This might explain why contributions are often rather conceptual, short on implementation details, and underrepresented at core MDE venues. Consequently, the analysis has shown limited research outputs and low visibility. This calls for technically grounded work that treats accessibility as a first-class concern. The applied methods are mixed: While WCAG is used by most of the approaches, and models commonly capture the UI, interactions, and navigation, only five studies consider modeling accessibility requirements (without being specific enough to enable reproduction). Evaluations are sparse: 10 studies have no evaluation, and only 6 conducted user studies, whereas only 3 of them involved visually impaired participants. None provided additional evaluation data packages to support replication of the evaluation. Measuring the achieved accessibility of applications remains challenging, as only using automated checkers is not sufficient and conducting user studies is time-intensive. Using our results, we have sketched some possible research topics in analysis, design, implementation, and testing of accessible applications using MDE. Promising research directions include (i) analysis and design techniques that make accessibility requirements explicit, traceable and verifiable at the model level, (ii) reusable model transformations, code templates, code generators and runtime components that include accessibility, and (iii) testing approaches increasing the level of automation and checking for compliance with accessibility requirements. Exploring the interplay with methods from AI and generative AI provides additional possible research directions. Advancing the field will require publishing more implementation details and replication packages. In summary, the current state-of-the-art demonstrates potential for improving accessibility of software applications with MDE methods. Providing more reusable artefacts on model, template, and code level and transparent evaluations with relevant user groups, the MDE community can improve development methods for accessibility for visual impairments, delivering an important impact on society” (“TOSEM-2025-0885”, p. 32)
Consider that those that are tagged with #5fb236 are just highlights, those that are tagged with #e56eee and #a28ae5 are important sentences.
Please pay attention to the notes that are tagged with #ffd400. Those that are tagged with #ff6666 are typos or errors. Could you please draft a review by organizing it as follows:
SUMMARY: Just a few sentence to summarize the work
COMMENTS: Organize the notes especially those that contain issues or typos.
Please avoid overstatements and minimize bullet points. The comments have to be fluent, informative.
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