Spatial Organization Is Accessibility Structure: Hierarchical Screen Reading of Mobile UIs

Abstract

Screen readers for blind and low-vision (BLV) users flatten mobile UIs into a linear sequence. Modern mobile UIs, however, contain dozens of elements grouped by spatial layout. Such linear access is ill-suited for BLV users, who must infer each element's meaning and which elements form a functional unit. Drawing on a quantitative TalkBack audit and formative interviews, we present Spatial Screen Reader (SeeR), which builds a function-aware hierarchy from accessibility metadata and provides unit summaries with hierarchical navigation. Compared with TalkBack, SeeR reduces non-informative focus stops by 82.1% and navigation steps by 52.7%. With ten BLV participants, summaries helped them connect controls to their functions and skip nonessential elements, especially on unfamiliar pages, though extra navigation levels added effort when the target was already known. These findings recast spatial organization as accessibility information: apps and platforms should expose it, rather than leaving screen readers to infer it post hoc.