Articles
Original articles on digital accessibility, research, and practice.
5 results found tagged deaf and hard of hearing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.