  According to the World Health Organization(WHO), it is estimated that
approximately 1.3 billion people live with some forms of vision impairment
globally, of whom 36 million are blind. Due to their disability, engaging these
minority into the society is a challenging problem. The recent rise of smart
mobile phones provides a new solution by enabling blind users' convenient
access to the information and service for understanding the world. Users with
vision impairment can adopt the screen reader embedded in the mobile operating
systems to read the content of each screen within the app, and use gestures to
interact with the phone. However, the prerequisite of using screen readers is
that developers have to add natural-language labels to the image-based
components when they are developing the app. Unfortunately, more than 77% apps
have issues of missing labels, according to our analysis of 10,408 Android
apps. Most of these issues are caused by developers' lack of awareness and
knowledge in considering the minority. And even if developers want to add the
labels to UI components, they may not come up with concise and clear
description as most of them are of no visual issues. To overcome these
challenges, we develop a deep-learning based model, called LabelDroid, to
automatically predict the labels of image-based buttons by learning from
large-scale commercial apps in Google Play. The experimental results show that
our model can make accurate predictions and the generated labels are of higher
quality than that from real Android developers.
