Literature Reviews

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

• LaboSignes: an Interactive French Sign Language Recognition Interface

  Jules Françoise, Julie Lascar, Cyril Verrechia, Sidonie Minodier, Michèle Gouiffès, Annelies Braffort (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26)

  LaboSignes is a web-based interactive French Sign Language (LSF) recognition system aimed at search-by-sign, addressing the fact that most online resources, including bilingual dictionaries and news sites, are navigable only through written French, w…

  • sign language
  • French Sign Language
  • sign language recognition
  • Deaf accessibility
  • gesture recognition
  • interface design
  • transformer
  • pose estimation
  • web 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

• Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool

  Sanchita S. Kamath, Aziz N. Zeidieh, Venkatesh Potluri, Sile O'Modhrain, Kenneth Perry, JooYoung Seo (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Kamath et al. report an Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) process in which five blind or low-vision (BLV) researchers and one sighted collaborator built a web-native, multimodal prototype for exploring 3D surface plots - a class of visualisation cent…

  • blind and low vision
  • data visualization
  • 3D visualization
  • sonification
  • spatial audio
  • tactile graphics
  • experience-based co-design
  • multimodal interaction
  • STEM accessibility
  • non-visual interaction
  • participatory design
  • co-design
  • web accessibility

• Access Over Deception: Fighting Deceptive Patterns through Accessibility

  Tobias Pellkvist, Katie Seaborn, Miu Kojima (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This exploratory paper asks whether the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and related European legislation — the European Accessibility Act (EAA), the Digital Services Act (DSA), and the upcoming Digital Fairness Act (DFA) — can be repurpos…

  • dark patterns
  • deceptive design
  • manipulative interfaces
  • heuristic evaluation
  • web accessibility
  • legislation
  • design ethics
  • WCAG compliance

• 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

• 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

• Empirical Investigation of Users' Preferred Timing Parameters for American Sign Language Animations

  Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20)

  This CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work (7 pages) investigates a narrow but consequential HCI question: what timing values should be used when generating American Sign Language (ASL) animations from a script, so that Deaf viewers find them comfortable to wa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • web accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • animation

• Proposing New Metrics to Evaluate Web Usability for the Blind

  Kentarou Fukuda, Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2005) — CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This four-page CHI '05 extended abstract argues that existing automated accessibility checkers — in 2005 typified by Bobby — had plateaued: they verified the presence of ALT attributes, labels, and markup conformance, yet real blind users still found…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility metrics
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • blindness and low vision
  • automated accessibility
  • alt text
  • accessibility testing

• User Interface of a Nonvisual Table Navigation Method

  Chieko Asakawa, Takashi Itoh (1999) — CHI '99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This two-page CHI '99 late-breaking-results extended abstract addresses a problem that was central to the early accessible web: HTML tables were everywhere — used both for tabular data and, at the time, as a layout device — but talking web browsers r…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • table accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • assistive technology
  • text-to-speech

• Analysis of Navigability of Web Applications for Improving Blind Usability

  Hironobu Takagi, Shin Saito, Kentarou Fukuda, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 14, No. 3, Article 13

  This TOCHI article is a two-study investigation into why modern web applications — especially visually dense online shopping sites — remain slow and frustrating for blind users even when they pass automated accessibility checks. The authors argue tha…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • navigation
  • usability testing
  • blindness and low vision
  • accessibility evaluation
  • assistive technology
  • accessibility research