Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
343 results found tagged screen readers.
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Tracking @stemxcomet: Teaching Programming to Blind Students via 3D Printing, Crisis Management, and Twitter
This paper describes the design and execution of a four-day programming workshop for blind and visually impaired high school students, conducted as part of the National Federation of the Blind's STEM-X summer science camp. Nine students (grades 8-12)…
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Screen Recognition: Creating Accessibility Metadata for Mobile Applications from Pixels
This paper from Apple introduces Screen Recognition, a system that automatically generates accessibility metadata for mobile apps by analyzing their visual pixels, enabling screen readers to work with apps that lack proper developer-provided accessib…
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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…
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"It's Complicated": Negotiating Accessibility and (Mis)Representation in Image Descriptions of Race, Gender, and Disability
This qualitative study investigates how screen reader users who are also Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), non-binary, and/or transgender navigate the complex landscape of image descriptions, particularly regarding how appearance characteri…
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Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile Apps
This paper presents a system for automatically generating whole-app accessibility reports for mobile apps, addressing key limitations of existing accessibility scanning tools. The work begins with formative interviews with eight accessibility QA prof…
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Screen Parsing: Towards Reverse Engineering of UI Models from Screenshots
This paper introduces screen parsing, the task of predicting UI elements and their hierarchical relationships from a screenshot alone. While prior work could detect individual UI elements on a screen (element detection), those approaches produced fla…
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Diffscriber: Describing Visual Design Changes to Support Mixed-Ability Collaborative Presentation Authoring
This paper presents Diffscriber, a system that identifies and describes visual design changes made to slide presentations, enabling blind and visually impaired (BVI) presenters to meaningfully participate in collaborative slide authoring with sighted…
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Never-ending Learning of User Interfaces
This paper introduces the Never-ending UI Learner, an automated system that continuously crawls real mobile applications to learn semantic properties of user interfaces. The system addresses a fundamental limitation of current approaches to UI unders…
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Morae: Proactively Pausing UI Agents for User Choices
This paper introduces Morae, a UI agent that proactively pauses during automated task execution to involve blind and low-vision (BLV) users in critical decisions, rather than completing tasks end-to-end without user input. The work is motivated by a …
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System-class Accessibility: The Architectural Support for Making a Whole System Usable by People with Disabilities
This article introduces the concept of "system-class accessibility" — the architectural support built into an operating system to make the entire platform usable by people with disabilities. Written by Chris Fleizach (who led the development of Voice…