Literature Reviews

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

• A Web Accessibility Service: Update and Findings

  Vicki L. Hanson, John T. Richards (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

  This paper reports on the evolution of IBM's Web Accessibility Service from a proxy server prototype (presented at Assets 2002) to a client-side architecture that transforms web pages on the fly to meet the needs of older adults and people with disab…

  • web accessibility
  • web adaptation
  • aging
  • assistive technology
  • personalization
  • content adaptation
  • browser accessibility
  • user interface
  • web transcoding

• Site-Wide Annotation: Reconstructing Existing Pages to Be Accessible

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda, Junji Maeda (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '02)

  This paper from IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory presents a system for making inaccessible web pages accessible through external annotations, without modifying the original pages. The core problem is "page fragmentation" — on visually designed web pages…

  • web accessibility
  • web transcoding
  • web annotation
  • screen reader
  • blindness and low vision
  • DOM
  • XPath
  • content adaptation

• A Semantic Transcoding System to Adapt Web Services for Users with Disabilities

  Anita W. Huang, Neel Sundaresan (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from IBM Almaden Research Center presents Aurora, a semantic transcoding system that adapts web-based services for users with disabilities by extracting the meaning of web content rather than simply reformatting its syntax. The key problem…

  • web accessibility
  • web transcoding
  • content adaptation
  • XML
  • semantic web
  • assistive technology
  • web navigation
  • adaptive interface

• Annotation-Based Transcoding for Nonvisual Web Access

  Chieko Asakawa, Hironobu Takagi (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This companion paper to the same authors' transcoding proxy paper (also at Assets '00) provides a detailed technical description of the annotation-based component of their IBM Japan transcoding system. The core problem addressed is that modern web pa…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • transcoding
  • non-visual access
  • blindness and low vision
  • annotations
  • content adaptation
  • web navigation
  • crowdsourcing
  • authoring tools

• Transcoding Proxy for Nonvisual Web Access

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper presents a transcoding proxy system developed at IBM Japan that transforms existing web pages to be more accessible for blind users. The authors address the growing problem of web pages being designed with increasingly complex layouts that…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • transcoding
  • proxy
  • blind and low vision
  • non-visual access
  • annotations
  • content adaptation
  • web navigation

• A web browsing system based on adaptive presentation of web contents for cellular phones

  Yuki Arase, Takuya Maekawa, Takahiro Hara, Toshiaki Uemukai, Shojiro Nishio (2006) — Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from Osaka University and KDDI R&D Laboratories presents a web browsing system that adaptively presents web page components on cellular phones based on their content characteristics. The authors identify that browsing desktop-designed web …

  • mobile accessibility
  • content adaptation
  • adaptive presentation
  • small screen devices
  • auto-scrolling
  • web browsing

• Use of RSS feeds for content adaptation in mobile web browsing

  Alexander Blekas, John Garofalakis, Vasilios Stefanis (2006) — Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Patras presents a proxy-based system that uses RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to adapt web content for mobile phone browsing. The authors address the fundamental challenge that desktop web pages are largely in…

  • mobile accessibility
  • content adaptation
  • proxy server
  • RSS
  • mobile browsing
  • small screen devices

• Adapting learning environments with AccessForAll

  Greg Gay, Silvia Mirri, Marco Roccetti, Paola Salomoni (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

  This paper describes the first implementation of the ISO FDIS 24751 accessibility standards (and the closely related IMS AccessForAll specifications) in ATutor, an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) developed at the University of Toronto's …

  • e-learning accessibility
  • learning management systems
  • content adaptation
  • personalization
  • ISO 24751
  • IMS AccessForAll
  • open source
  • ATutor
  • inclusive education

• Augmenting social media accessibility

  Roberto Borrino, Marco Furini, Marco Roccetti (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

  This paper presents SOMFA (SOcial Media For All), an architecture that transforms web-based social media content into multimodal audio/video presentations suitable for television sets. The system addresses the growing social divide created by social …

  • social media
  • digital divide
  • aging
  • content adaptation
  • text-to-speech
  • multimodal interaction
  • television accessibility
  • web syndication

• Towards a Universal Accessibility for Textual Information

  Vasile Topac (2011) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This student award paper from Politehnica University Timisoara proposes a universal framework for understanding and addressing textual information accessibility across all media formats and contexts — not just web accessibility, but also document acc…

  • content adaptation
  • cloud computing
  • text-to-speech
  • speech recognition
  • multilingual accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • plain language
  • accessibility frameworks