Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
374 results found tagged visual impairment.
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ABC and 3D: Opportunities and Obstacles to 3D Printing in Special Education Environments
This paper presents a formative study exploring how 3D printing can support special education across three diverse sites: a school for students with moderate to severe cognitive disabilities (Site A), a school for blind and visually impaired students…
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Path-Guided Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired Using Minimal Building Retrofitting
This paper presents the design and evaluation of a cellphone-based indoor navigation system that provides step-by-step path guidance for visually impaired users in unfamiliar buildings with minimal infrastructure requirements. The system combines inf…
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From Screen Reading to Aural Glancing: Towards Instant Access to Key Page Sections
This paper addresses a fundamental problem in screen reader navigation: while sighted users can glance at a web page to instantly understand its structure and locate relevant sections, screen reader users are forced to listen to content serially, mak…
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Tactile Aids for Visually Impaired Graphical Design Education
This demonstration paper describes the creation of over 10 tactile aids using laser cutting and 3D printing to make graphic design theory accessible to a visually impaired student enrolled in an introduction to human-centered computing class at UMBC.…
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Text-to-Speeches: Evaluating the Perception of Concurrent Speech by Blind People
This paper investigates whether blind people can leverage the Cocktail Party Effect—the human ability to focus on one speech source among several while still detecting relevant content in the background—to more efficiently scan digital information. S…
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Headlock: A Wearable Navigation Aid that Helps Blind Cane Users Traverse Large Open Spaces
This paper presents HEADLOCK, a navigation aid for optical head-mounted displays (OHMDs) like Google Glass that helps blind cane users traverse large open spaces—environments that are particularly challenging because they lack the tactile features (w…
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Tactile Graphics with a Voice: Using QR Codes to Access Text in Tactile Graphics
This paper presents Tactile Graphics with a Voice (TGV), a system that makes text labels in tactile graphics accessible by replacing Braille labels with QR codes that can be scanned and read aloud using a smartphone. The motivation is significant: wh…
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Buildings and Users with Visual Impairment: Uncovering Factors for Accessibility Using BIT-Kit
This paper introduces BIT-Kit (Building Interactions Tool-kit), a mixed-method framework for gathering evidence about how buildings impact the accessibility of users with visual impairments. The framework combines three methods: semi-structured inter…
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Multimodal Trajectory Playback for Teaching Shape Information and Trajectories to Visually Impaired Computer Users
This research investigates how haptic (force-feedback) and audio trajectory playback can teach shapes and gestures to blind and visually impaired computer users. The fundamental challenge addressed is that spatial information—shapes, diagrams, graphs…
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Exploring Visual and Motor Accessibility in Navigating a Virtual World
This paper explores accessibility requirements for 3D virtual worlds, using PowerUp—an educational multiplayer game teaching middle schoolers about renewable energy—as a testbed. Virtual worlds present unique accessibility challenges: they rely on vi…