Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
33 results found tagged image accessibility.
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Augmenting Imagery with Multimodal Vibrotactile Representations: Touch, Feel, and Hear
This CHI 2026 paper addresses a long-standing gap in image accessibility for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users: while alt text, sonification, tactile graphics, and refreshable Braille displays convey shape, layout, and identity, they rarely com…
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Improving Accessibility of HTML Documents by Generating Image-Tags in a Proxy
This paper from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Technical University Kaiserslautern presents a system that automatically generates ALT tags for images on web pages by analysing image contents through a web proxy. The…
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Automatic Production of Tactile Graphics from Scalable Vector Graphics
This paper from the University of Delaware presents a method for automatically converting Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) into tactile representations for blind users using a Braille embosser. The key innovation exploits the hierarchical tree structur…
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Tactile Imaging Using Watershed-Based Image Segmentation
This paper from the University of Delaware proposes a new image segmentation method for automatically converting visual images into tactile representations suitable for display on tactile devices such as microcapsule (swell) paper. The core problem a…
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TGuide: A Guidance System for Tactile Image Exploration
This paper presents TGuide, a system that actively guides blind users' hands during exploration of tactile graphics using a novel vibrotactile directional output device. The author identifies three key problems with unaided tactile image exploration:…
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WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible
This paper introduces WebInSight, a system that automatically generates and inserts alternative text for web images that lack it. The authors first establish the scale of the problem through a series of web studies examining five groups of important …
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Multimodal Summarization of Complex Sentences
This paper introduces the concept of multimodal summarization (MMS) for complex sentences — automatically generating diagrams that combine pictures, simplified compressed text, and structural layout to help people understand difficult text. The syste…
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Increasing Web Accessibility by Automatically Judging Alternative Text Quality
This paper presents a machine learning classifier that can automatically judge whether alternative text assigned to web images is appropriate or inappropriate, using contextual features rather than visual analysis of the image itself. The research ad…
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"It's almost like they're trying to hide it": How User-Provided Image Descriptions Have Failed to Make Twitter Accessible
This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of how Twitter's opt-in image description feature (launched in 2016) has affected the accessibility of images on the platform. The researchers analyzed 1.09 million tweets with images collecte…
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Twitter A11y: A Browser Extension to Make Twitter Images Accessible
This paper presents Twitter A11y, a browser extension designed to address the widespread lack of alternative text on images posted to Twitter. The authors note that while around 12% of Twitter content consists of images, only 0.1% of those images inc…