Literature Reviews

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

• Predictive, Accessible Web Automation: A Longitudinal Study

  Yury Puzis, Yevgen Borodin, I.V. Ramakrishnan (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents a six-week longitudinal pilot study of Automation Assistant, a predictive web automation system designed to improve non-visual web browsing for blind users. The core problem is that screen readers force users to navigate web pages…

  • screen readers
  • web automation
  • blindness
  • non-visual web access
  • adaptive interfaces
  • machine learning
  • usability
  • assistive technology

• HEUA: A Heuristic Evaluation with Usability and Accessibility Requirements to Assess Web Systems

  Ana Luiza Dias, Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes, Paulo Cesar Masiero (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Sao Paulo presents HEUA (Heuristic Evaluation with Usability and Accessibility), a questionnaire-based instrument that integrates usability and accessibility assessment into a single evaluation framework for web syst…

  • accessibility testing
  • usability testing
  • heuristic evaluation
  • evaluation methods
  • web accessibility
  • WCAG compliance
  • quality assurance

• Global Considerations in Creating an Organizational Web Accessibility Policy

  David Sloan, Sarah Horton (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from The Paciello Group examines the legislative and policy landscape for web accessibility across five countries — Australia, Brazil, China, India, and South Africa — to help multinational organisations develop global accessibility polici…

  • accessibility policy
  • accessibility law
  • global accessibility
  • WCAG compliance
  • organizational accessibility
  • disability rights
  • copyright accessibility
  • PDF accessibility

• Listen to Everything You Want to Read with Capti Narrator

  Yevgen Borodin, Yuri Puzis, Andrii Soviak, James Bouker, Bo Feng, Richard Sicoli, Andrii Melnyk, Valentyn Melnyk, Vikas Ashok, Glenn Dausch, I.V. Ramakrishnan (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents Capti Narrator, a cross-platform text-to-speech application developed by Charmtech Labs that enables hands-free consumption of digital content. Unlike traditional screen readers that are tightly coupled to operating system interfa…

  • text-to-speech
  • print disability
  • screen reader
  • mobile accessibility
  • universal access
  • reading accessibility
  • assistive technology

• Can a Blind Person Understand Your World?

  Chieko Asakawa (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This keynote paper by Chieko Asakawa of IBM Research presents a vision for the next frontier of accessibility for blind people: moving from digital information access to real-world understanding through cognitive computing. Asakawa charts the exponen…

  • blindness
  • cognitive assistance
  • image recognition
  • computer vision
  • machine learning
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology
  • navigation
  • augmented reality

• 'The new accessibility panic': Remaining challenges to the achievement of Australia's National Transition Strategy

  Denise Wood, Scott Hollier (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper examines the Australian Government's progress toward its 2010 National Transition Strategy (NTS), which mandated that all federal, state, and territory websites achieve WCAG 2.0 Level AA conformance by the end of 2014. Drawing on content a…

  • web accessibility
  • government accessibility
  • accessibility policy
  • WCAG compliance
  • accessibility training
  • PDF accessibility
  • captioning
  • accessibility testing
  • organizational accessibility

• Accessibility and Smart Data: the Case Study of mPASS

  Catia Prandi (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This doctoral consortium paper presents mPASS (mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing), a research project from the University of Bologna that applies the concept of Smart Data to urban accessibility. The paper argues that while crowdsourcing …

  • accessible maps
  • crowdsourcing
  • smart data
  • urban accessibility
  • user modeling
  • mobile accessibility
  • personalization
  • navigation

• APSIS4all: Personalisation as a Strategy to Ensure Accessibility and Enhance User Experience of Public Digital Terminals

  R. Ignacio Madrid, Christopher Bailey (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the APSIS4all project, a European Commission-funded initiative that uses personalisation to make Public Digital Terminals (PDTs) — specifically ATMs and Ticket Vending Machines (TVMs) — accessible to people with disabilities, olde…

  • kiosk accessibility
  • personalization
  • public digital terminals
  • ATM accessibility
  • user experience
  • assistive technology
  • NFC
  • sign language avatar
  • user profiles
  • adaptive interfaces

• An Optimal Sampling Method for Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric

  Mengni Zhang, Can Wang, Jiajun Bu, Zhi Yu, Yi Lu, Ruijie Zhang, Chun Chen (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2015)

  This short paper proposes OPS-WAQM, an optimal page sampling method specifically designed for use with the Web Accessibility Quantitative Metric (WAQM) when evaluating large websites. The core problem is that evaluating every page of a large website …

  • accessibility evaluation
  • sampling methods
  • accessibility metrics
  • WAQM
  • large-scale evaluation
  • government websites
  • quantitative metrics
  • statistical methods

• SmartWrap: Seeing Datasets with the Crowd's Eyes

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2015)

  This paper presents SmartWrap, a Firefox extension that enables sighted web users — including nonprogrammers — to create reusable "wrappers" that extract the semantic structure of visually-presented datasets on web pages, making them navigable by scr…

  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • semantic annotation
  • web scraping
  • end user programming
  • data tables
  • nonvisual accessibility
  • wrapper construction