Literature Reviews

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

• Improving Smartphone Accessibility with Personalizable Static Overlays

  André Rodrigues, André Santos, Kyle Montague, Tiago Guerreiro (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper addresses a fundamental usability problem for blind smartphone users: the loss of interface consistency that occurred when physical keypad phones gave way to touchscreen smartphones. Feature phones had tactually recognizable keys, simpler …

  • blindness
  • smartphone accessibility
  • screen readers
  • mobile accessibility
  • personalization
  • interaction design
  • touchscreen accessibility
  • TalkBack

• An Exploratory Case Study to Support Young Children with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA)

  Sheng Miao, Ziying Tang, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, Amanda Jozkowski, Molly Lichtenwalner (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This demonstration paper presents a case study exploring input solutions for very young children with Type I Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), the most severe form of a neurodegenerative disease that causes degeneration of spinal cord motor neurons, ske…

  • spinal muscular atrophy
  • motor disability
  • alternative input
  • sensors
  • young children
  • assistive technology
  • environmental control
  • case study

• Virtual Navigation for Blind People: Building Sequential Representations of the Real-World

  João Guerreiro, Dragan Ahmetovic, Kris M. Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper investigates whether blind people can build accurate mental representations of real-world routes by virtually navigating them on a smartphone before physically visiting the location. Sighted people routinely study maps before visiting new …

  • blindness
  • navigation
  • cognitive mapping
  • virtual navigation
  • orientation and mobility
  • spatial cognition
  • assistive technology
  • wayfinding

• Narratives of Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment and Their Caregivers

  Galina Madjaroff, Helena Mentis (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper examines how the narratives — the stories people tell about their lives and experiences — of older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and their spousal caregivers shape and are shaped by technology in the home. MCI is defined as a…

  • cognitive impairment
  • dementia
  • caregiving
  • aging
  • home-based technology
  • disability models
  • qualitative research
  • autonomy
  • biopsychosocial model

• In-context Q&A to Support Blind People Using Smartphones

  André Rodrigues, Kyle Montague, Hugo Nicolau, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper addresses a pervasive but understudied problem: the daily challenges blind people face when using smartphone applications go far beyond the touchscreen gesture difficulties that most accessibility research focuses on. The researchers condu…

  • blindness
  • smartphone accessibility
  • screen readers
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • mobile accessibility
  • peer support
  • knowledge sharing

• DroneNavigator: Using Leashed and Free-Floating Quadcopters to Navigate Visually Impaired Travelers

  Mauro Avila Soto, Markus Funk, Matthias Hoppe, Robin Boldt, Katrin Wolf, Niels Henze (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper explores an unconventional approach to navigation assistance for visually impaired travelers: using small, lightweight quadcopters as mobile sound and haptic sources to guide users through indoor environments. While existing navigation sys…

  • navigation
  • blindness
  • drones
  • assistive technology
  • haptic technology
  • spatial audio
  • multimodal interaction
  • wayfinding

• DytectiveU: A Game to Train the Difficulties and the Strengths of Children with Dyslexia

  Luz Rello, Arturo Macias, María Herrera, Camila de Ros, Enrique Romero, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This demonstration paper presents DytectiveU, a game-based application containing 35,000 exercises designed to train cognitive abilities related to dyslexia in Spanish-speaking children. Unlike most existing dyslexia interventions that focus narrowly…

  • dyslexia
  • serious games
  • cognitive accessibility
  • gamification
  • learning disabilities
  • education
  • personalization
  • reading accessibility

• COSMA: Cooperative Self-Management Tool for Adolescents with Autism

  Myeonghan Ryu, Eunkyung Jo, Sung-In Kim (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This student research competition paper presents COSMA, a mobile application prototype designed to support cooperative self-management of behavior for adolescents with autism during their transition through puberty. Adolescence is particularly challe…

  • autism
  • self-management
  • adolescents
  • behavior change
  • mobile application
  • caregiving
  • self-regulation
  • co-design

• Crowdsourcing the Installation and Maintenance of Indoor Navigation Infrastructure

  Cole Gleason (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This student research competition paper presents LuzDeploy, a system designed to solve a major barrier to the adoption of indoor navigation systems for people with visual impairments: the high cost and expertise required to install and maintain the n…

  • indoor navigation
  • crowdsourcing
  • Bluetooth beacons
  • blindness
  • wayfinding
  • assistive technology
  • physical crowdsourcing

• Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

  Sushant Kafle, Matt Huenerfauth (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper addresses a fundamental problem in automatic captioning for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users: the standard metric used to evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems — Word Error Rate (WER) — poorly predicts how usable the resu…

  • captioning
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • evaluation methods
  • natural language processing
  • real-time captioning
  • metrics