  This contribution investigates how cross-platform development frameworks
(CPDF) support the creation of mobile applications that are accessible to
people with visual impairments through screen readers. We first systematically
analyze screen-reader APIs available in native iOS and Android, and we examine
whether and at what level the same functionalities are available in two popular
CPDF: Xamarin and React Native. This analysis unveils that there are many
functionalities shared between native iOS and Android APIs, but most of them
are not available in React Native or Xamarin. In particular, not even all basic
APIs are exposed by the examined CPDF.
  Accessing the unavailable APIs is still possible, but it requires an
additional effort by the developers who need to know native APIs and to write
platform specific code, hence partially negating the advantages of CPDF. To
address this problem, we consider a representative set of native APIs that
cannot be directly accessed from React Native and Xamarin and show sample
implementations for accessing them.
