Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
16 articles — page 2 of 2
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Sign Language and Technology: Advances, Tensions, and the Question of Who Benefits
Research on sign language accessibility reveals a field where impressive technical progress coexists with fundamental questions about privacy, community authority, and whether the technology serves deaf people or merely studies them. This article examines 74 papers spanning recognition and translation, the 93% privacy concern rate for sign language data, the disconnect between ML practitioners and the Deaf community, avatar resistance, information access, learning technology, and the persistent one-directional translation bias.
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Seeing Data Differently: How Accessibility Research Is Rethinking Charts, Graphs, and Visual Information
Data visualisation is one of the most persistent accessibility challenges — and researchers are moving beyond alt text to multimodal, interactive, and community-driven approaches. This article examines approximately 80 papers spanning the screen reader gap, sonification that achieves performance parity with sighted users, tactile graphics from embroidered textures to data comics, dashboard navigation, AI-assisted interpretation, the overlooked needs of low-vision magnifier users, and the shift from data consumption to data creation by blind users.
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Machine Learning and Digital Accessibility: What Works, What Fails, and What Gets Lost in Between
AI is simultaneously the most promising tool and the most documented source of harm in recent accessibility research. This article examines approximately 235 papers revealing where machine learning helps — captioning accuracy improved by 5.6%, web navigation 52% faster, audio description production halved — and where it fails: fabricating image descriptions, reproducing ableist stereotypes in career chatbots, homogenising personalised AAC tools, and systematically excluding anyone whose body or speech falls outside training data norms.
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AI Safety and Disability: What Accessibility Research Reveals About Hallucination, Bias, Privacy, and the Protocols That Do and Don't Exist
Disabled people depend on AI systems they cannot verify, trust AI outputs that fabricate content, and share intimate data with platforms that offer no disability-specific protections. This article examines approximately 135 papers documenting 79 AI harm incidents, the 4.9x improvement in unreliable claim detection when AI uncertainty is surfaced, zero disability-specific privacy protections across 18 AT policies, sycophantic AI behaviour, age stereotyping, career chatbot fabrication, and the protocols that do and do not exist to protect disabled users.
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Where Are the Deafblind Users in Digital Accessibility Research?
What the academic literature tells us about an overlooked population — and the researchers working to change that. Drawing on 12 peer-reviewed papers from the A11y Paradise database, this article examines the barriers deafblind people face in digital accessibility and the innovative solutions emerging from haptic technology, cross-disability research, and policy analysis.
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The Current State of Digital Accessibility Research and AI: What 137 Papers Tell Us
A comprehensive analysis of 137 peer-reviewed accessibility research papers published between 2021 and 2025, examining how AI is simultaneously the most promising tool and the most concerning threat in digital accessibility.