Literature Reviews

Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.

• Measuring the Semantic Accessibility Gap in LLM-Generated Web UIs

  Tommaso Calo, Alexandra-Elena Gurita, Luigi De Russis (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Calo, Gurita, and De Russis investigate a blind spot of mainstream automated accessibility tools: while scanners like Axe-core reliably catch missing alt attributes or unlabelled form fields (syntactic violations), they cannot tell whether the values…

  • web accessibility
  • large language models
  • LLM code generation
  • semantic accessibility
  • WCAG
  • LLM-as-judge
  • automated testing
  • alt text
  • ARIA
  • AI and accessibility

• iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility

  Peya Mowar, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper from Mowar, Steinfeld, and Bigham (Carnegie Mellon) presents iTagPDF, an automated system for tagging academic research PDFs so they are accessible to screen reader users. The authors argue that PDF accessibility has remained a pe…

  • PDF accessibility
  • tagged PDF
  • PDF remediation
  • automated accessibility
  • document layout analysis
  • LLM
  • vision-language models
  • LaTeX
  • alt text
  • reading order
  • scholarly publishing
  • automated testing

• Judge: Effective State Abstraction for Guiding Automated Web GUI Testing

  Chenxu Liu, Junheng Wang, Wei Yang, Ying Zhang, Tao Xie (2026) — ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

  This paper presents Judge, a novel approach to state abstraction for automated web GUI testing (AWGT). AWGTs explore web applications by performing GUI actions and building a state model to guide further exploration, maximising code coverage within a…

  • automated testing
  • web accessibility
  • GUI testing
  • DOM
  • machine learning
  • contrastive learning
  • state abstraction
  • accessibility evaluation

• Towards Testing the Accessibility of Dynamic Visual Changes in Android Mobile GUI with Multi-Modal LLMs

  Mengxi Zhang, Jianlin Yu, Chen Xu, Jiqun Li, Xinglong Yin, Huaxiao Liu (2026) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This paper addresses a long-standing gap in mobile accessibility testing: dynamic visual changes in Android GUIs that communicate task status or feedback to sighted users but are invisible to blind users of screen readers such as TalkBack. Examples i…

  • Android
  • mobile accessibility
  • screen readers
  • TalkBack
  • automated testing
  • large language models
  • GPT-4o
  • blind users
  • dynamic content
  • GUI testing
  • prompt engineering

• AXECC: Benchmarking the Privacy and Accessibility Impact of Browser Extensions

  James Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini (2026) — ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

  This paper presents AXECC, a novel automated framework for jointly measuring the web-tracking behaviour and accessibility impact of browser extensions at scale. The authors argue that while browser extensions are widely installed to improve the brows…

  • browser extensions
  • web tracking
  • privacy
  • accessibility testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • WAVE
  • Lighthouse
  • dark mode
  • screen readers
  • assistive technology

• OPTIMAL-EM: Complexity-Driven Clustering for Optimised Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2026) — ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 20, No. 2

  Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper (University of Manchester and METU-NCC) extend their OPTIMAL-EM methodology for large-scale web accessibility conformance evaluation. The problem they address is fundamental to professional auditing: the W3C's Webs…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG-EM
  • OPTIMAL-EM
  • representative sampling
  • web page complexity
  • clustering
  • DBSCAN
  • t-SNE
  • machine learning
  • audit methodology
  • automated testing

• SAMBA: a semi-automatic method for measuring barriers of accessibility

  Giorgio Brajnik, Raffaella Lomuscio (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Brajnik and Lomuscio argue that web accessibility cannot be managed without being measured, yet existing accessibility metrics are underdeveloped and almost universally tied to conformance with WCAG checkpoints rather than to the real-world barriers …

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility metrics
  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility testing
  • conformance testing
  • barrier walkthrough
  • expert review
  • automated testing
  • quality assurance

• Improving the outcomes of students with cognitive and learning disabilities: phase I development for a web accessibility tool

  Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by Web…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive disabilities
  • learning disabilities
  • cognitive load
  • evaluation tools
  • WAVE
  • WebAIM
  • web accessibility
  • students
  • education
  • automated testing

• Effects of sampling methods on web accessibility evaluations

  Giorgio Brajnik, Andrea Mulas, Claudia Pitton (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Brajnik, Mulas, and Pitton's Assets '07 paper is a large, careful empirical investigation of the sampling step in web-accessibility evaluation — the step at which an evaluator picks which pages of a site to actually test. For any site above a trivial…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • sampling methods
  • accessibility metrics
  • conformance testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • quality assurance
  • research methodology
  • accessibility audit

• Feedback-based evaluation tool for web accessibility

  Daisuke Asai, Masahiro Watanabe, Yoko Asano (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories proposes a feedback-driven approach to improving automated web-accessibility evaluation tools. The authors frame the familiar problem that automated checkers such as Bobb…

  • web accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • crowdsourcing
  • WCAG
  • accessibility tools
  • evaluation rules