Literature Reviews — A11y Paradise

Improving Non-Visual Web Access Using Context

Jalal Mahmud, Yevgen Borodin, Dipanjan Das, I.V. Ramakrishnan (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

This paper presents CSurf, a context-directed non-visual web browsing system that significantly reduces browsing time for blind users by intelligently rearranging page content based on navigational context. The core insight is that when a sighted use…

Audio Enriched Links: Web Page Previews for Blind Users

Peter Parente (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

This paper presents Audio Enriched Links (AEL), a JAWS screen reader extension for Internet Explorer that provides spoken previews of linked web pages before blind users follow a hyperlink. The system addresses a fundamental asymmetry in web browsing…

Rendering Tables in Audio: The Interaction of Structure and Reading Styles

Yeliz Yesilada, Robert Stevens, Carole Goble, Shazad Hussein (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of why HTML tables are problematic for screen reader users and proposes two complementary approaches for non-visual table access. The authors from the University of Manchester first characterize what makes…

Semantic Bookmarking for Non-Visual Web Access

Saikat Mukherjee, I. V. Ramakrishnan, Michael Kifer (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

This paper introduces semantic bookmarking, a technique for non-visual web access that allows blind users to bookmark meaningful content segments on web pages using domain ontologies rather than structural HTML positions. The research is built on Hea…

Middleware to Expand Context and Preview in Hypertext

Simon Harper, Carole Goble, Robert Stevens, Yeliz Yesilada (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

This paper presents a middleware tool that automatically annotates web pages with expanded context and preview information for hypertext links, addressing a core navigation problem for visually impaired web users. The authors draw an analogy between …

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…

Fast Web by Using Updated Content Extraction and a Bookmark Facility

Tsuyoshi Ebina, Seiji Igi, Teruhisa Miyake (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

This paper from Japan's Communications Research Laboratory presents two techniques for improving speech-based web navigation for visually impaired users. The core problem is that accessing web pages through speech output is significantly slower than …

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…

A Comparison of Voice Controlled and Mouse Controlled Web Browsing

Kevin Christian, Bill Kules, Ben Shneiderman, Adel Youssef (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

This within-subjects study from the University of Maryland compared voice-controlled web browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing using 18 participants. The researchers used Conversa, a commercial voice browser from Conversational Computing tha…

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…