Literature Reviews

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

• SADIe: exposing implicit information to improve accessibility

  Darren Lunn (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Darren Lunn's Assets '07 demonstration paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a transcoding system from the University of Manchester that uses Semantic Web ontologies to expose the implicit visual str…

  • web accessibility
  • transcoding
  • semantic web
  • ontology
  • CSS
  • screen readers
  • visual impairment
  • accessibility evaluation
  • randomisation test
  • single-subject design

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on M…

  • flash
  • transcoding
  • automatic repair
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • web accessibility
  • MSAA

• SADIe: Transcoding Based on CSS

  Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer, Darren Lunn (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a system that improves web accessibility for visually impaired users by leveraging semantic information already encoded in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The…

  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • transcoding
  • CSS
  • screen readers
  • semantic web
  • document engineering

• 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

• Investigating Sighted Users' Browsing Behaviour to Assist Web Accessibility

  Eleni Michailidou, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents an eye tracking study investigating how sighted users browse web pages, with the goal of using these insights to improve web accessibility for visually impaired users. The core argument is that understanding sighted users' visual …

  • eye tracking
  • web accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • web design
  • visual complexity
  • screen readers
  • user research
  • browsing behavior
  • transcoding

• A user evaluation of the SADIe transcoder

  Darren Lunn, Sean Bechhofer, Simon Harper (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a user evaluation of SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a system that uses Semantic Web technologies to make web pages more accessible to screen reader users. The core problem SADIe addresses i…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • semantic web
  • transcoding
  • visual impairment
  • ontology
  • web content transformation
  • CSS
  • assistive technology

• Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement

  Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Masatomo Kobayashi, Shinya Kawanaka, Chieko Asakawa (2010) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental crowdsourced service from IBM Research-Tokyo that enables volunteers to fix web accessibility problems without requiring site owners to modify their pages. L…

  • crowdsourcing
  • web accessibility
  • social computing
  • metadata
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • collaborative accessibility
  • blind users
  • transcoding

• Identifying Behavioral Strategies of Visually Impaired Users to Improve Access to Web Content

  Darren Lunn, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer (2011) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a methodology for identifying how visually impaired screen reader users develop coping strategies when encountering inaccessible web content, then uses those strategies to inform the design of transcoding solutions. The researcher…

  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • transcoding
  • coping strategies
  • user behavior
  • visual impairment
  • ARIA

• EnTable: Rewriting Web Data Sets as Accessible Tables

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This demonstration paper presents EnTable, a crowdsourcing system that transforms visually complex web data presentations into accessible HTML tables. The problem it addresses is fundamental: modern web designers communicate semantic information thro…

  • web accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • data tables
  • transcoding
  • HTML tables
  • browser extension
  • remote sighted assistance