Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
10 results found tagged assistive technology.
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Robots and Disability: What 36 Accessibility Studies Tell Us
A survey of 36 peer-reviewed accessibility research papers on robotics and disability — spanning the full CaBot / AI Suitcase navigation programme from Chieko Asakawa and colleagues, physical collaboration for blind users, gaze-controlled manipulation, feeding robots, telepresence in classrooms and museums, socially assistive robots (SARs) for older adults, adults with intellectual disabilities, AAC users, and perinatal depression screening, neurodivergent design with robot dogs and swarm robots, BMI-controlled performance, dynamic tactile graphics, a tabletop humanoid that teaches posture to blind learners, and Jang et al.'s theoretical reframing from autonomy to relational sovereignty.
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Extended Reality and Accessibility: What 51 Research Papers Tell Us About Making Virtual and Augmented Worlds Inclusive
The promise is immense. The barriers are real. Drawing on 51 peer-reviewed papers from the A11y Paradise database, this article maps what accessibility researchers have discovered, built, and tested across the XR landscape — from non-visual VR gaming to haptic sound substitution, wheelchair-embodied accessibility assessment, and the complex identity politics of disability in virtual worlds.
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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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First Person: How Autoethnography Is Changing What Accessibility Research Can Say
Disabled researchers are turning their own experiences into scholarship — and the findings challenge assumptions that third-person studies cannot reach. From the distinction between technical sufficiency and experiential adequacy to the social dimension of access that controlled evaluations flatten, autoethnographic research is producing concepts, failure stories, and questions that other methods cannot generate.
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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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Neurodivergence and Digital Accessibility: What Researchers Are Finding
Recent accessibility scholarship is investigating ADHD, autism, and neurodiversity with a breadth and critical depth that challenges how the field thinks about disability itself. This article examines what researchers have found across 88 papers — from biased measurement instruments and the failures of AI career chatbots to how ADHD students build collaborative access through body doubling and how autistic livestreamers find social connection through asymmetric platform dynamics.
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Getting There: What Accessibility Research Reveals About Navigation and Wayfinding
Moving through the world — indoors, outdoors, in transit, and online — remains one of the deepest accessibility challenges. This article examines what researchers have found across 64 papers on navigation technology ecosystems, the broken state of urban infrastructure data, the persistent indoor navigation gap, museums as testing grounds for multisensory access, wheelchair users information needs, the social nature of navigation, and why context determines everything.
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Trends in Digital Accessibility Research: What Researchers Are Investigating, Finding, and Flagging (2020-2025)
Six years of peer-reviewed accessibility scholarship reveal shifting priorities, emerging populations, and uncomfortable gaps. This article examines trends in what accessibility researchers are choosing to study — from generative AI and neurodivergent experiences to intersecting identities and the Global South — what they are finding, and what they say is still missing.
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Beyond Speech: What Research Reveals About Augmentative, Alternative, and Accessible Communication
AAC research is moving past the speech-generating device toward a richer understanding of how communication actually works. This article examines 81 papers spanning AAC devices, sign language technology, speech recognition for atypical speech, captioning, and aphasia — revealing that 92.3% of high-tech AAC supports only verbal communication, 67% of devices are abandoned because vocabulary does not match daily life, and the most valued communication tools augment rather than replace users existing strategies.
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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.