Understanding user interfaces with screen parsing

This blog post summarizes our paper Screen Parsing: Towards Reverse Engineering of UI Models from Screenshots, which was published in the proceedings of UIST 2021. Machines that understand and operate user interfaces (UIs) on behalf of users could offer many benefits. For example, a screen reader (e.g., VoiceOver and TalkBack) could facilitate access to UIs for blind and visually impaired users, and task automation agents (e.g., Siri Shortcuts and IFTTT) could allow users to automate repetitive or complex tasks with their devices more efficiently. These benefits are gated on how well these systems can understand an underlying app's UI by reasoning about 1) the functionality present, 2) how its different components work together, and 3) how it can be operated to accomplish some goal. Many rely on the availability of UI metadata (e.g., the view hierarchy and the accessibility hierarchy), which provide some information about what elements are present and their properties.