Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
4 results found tagged blind and low vision.
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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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The Right to Shape Sound: How Accessibility Research Is Rethinking Music Composition and Performance
Music is an inherently aural art form — so why is music technology so deeply inaccessible? This article examines 29 peer-reviewed papers on making music composition and performance accessible, from the bleak software landscape facing blind producers to vibrotactile alternatives that free the audio channel, text-based composition tools, brain-controlled robotic performance arms, Deaf sonic agency, and the consistent finding that community-designed music technology outperforms external design.
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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.