Literature Reviews

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

• Pushing the Raman principle

  Clayton Lewis (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper explores the implications of what the author calls the "Raman Principle," attributed to T.V. Raman: "The way to think about the visual system is as a way to answer queries against a spatial database. If you have an alternate way to ask the…

  • visual programming
  • blindness
  • non-visual interaction
  • screen readers
  • programming accessibility
  • inclusive design

• Making Arabic PDF books accessible using gamification

  Hend AlRouqi, Hend S. Al-Khalifa (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses the inaccessibility of Arabic PDF books for people with visual impairments, blindness, and dyslexia. Most online Arabic books are scanned images of printed originals, making them unreadable by screen readers and text-to-speech so…

  • document accessibility
  • gamification
  • crowdsourcing
  • OCR
  • Arabic accessibility
  • print disability
  • multilingual accessibility

• Measuring and comparing the reliability of the structured walkthrough evaluation method with novices and experts

  Christopher Bailey, Elaine Pearson, Voula Gkatzidou (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper investigates the reliability of the Structured Walkthrough evaluation method — a systematic approach to manual accessibility evaluation embedded in the Accessibility Evaluation Assistant (AEA) tool. The AEA contains 48 accessibility heuris…

  • accessibility testing
  • web accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG compliance
  • evaluator effect
  • accessibility education
  • heuristic evaluation

• A survey of open accessibility data

  Chaohai Ding, Mike Wald, Gary Wills (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper surveys the landscape of open accessibility data in the UK, focusing on geographic and location-based datasets that could help people with disabilities navigate physical spaces and plan travel. The authors examine five data sources: Wheelm…

  • open data
  • linked data
  • accessible travel
  • crowdsourcing
  • semantic web
  • wheelchair accessibility
  • transportation accessibility

• "Bring your own problems": the path to WCAG 2.0 conformance through industry based training

  Denise Wood, Scott Hollier (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper examines Australia's National Transition Strategy (NTS), which mandated that all federal, state, and territory government websites conform to WCAG 2.0 by staged deadlines — Level A by December 2012 and Level AA by December 2014. The author…

  • accessibility training
  • WCAG compliance
  • government accessibility
  • professional development
  • web accessibility
  • policy implementation

• Are Users the Gold Standard for Accessibility Evaluation?

  Amaia Aizpurua, Myriam Arrue, Simon Harper, Markel Vigo (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper critically examines whether user testing with blind users is a reliable "gold standard" for web accessibility evaluation. Drawing on an exploratory study with 11 legally blind participants (10 JAWS users, 1 VoiceOver user, ages 21-64) who …

  • user testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • research methodology
  • bias
  • WCAG 2.0
  • participatory design
  • usability

• Towards Making Mathematics a First Class Citizen in General Screen Readers

  Volker Sorge, Charles Chen, T. V. Raman, David Tseng (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents a comprehensive approach to integrating mathematical speech translation into ChromeVox, Google's open-source screen reader for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. The authors address the fundamental challenge that mathematical notat…

  • screen readers
  • mathematics accessibility
  • MathML
  • ChromeVox
  • text-to-speech
  • STEM accessibility
  • semantic enrichment
  • interactive exploration
  • speech rules

• Marker-Assisted Recognition of Dynamic Content in Public Spaces

  Andréa Britto Mattos, Ricardo Herrmann, Carlos Cardonha, Diego Gallo, Priscilla Avegliano, Sergio Borger (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from IBM Research Brazil presents an image processing system that helps visually impaired and situationally disabled people (such as tourists in foreign countries) recognize dynamic content displayed on public information boards. The syste…

  • computer vision
  • visual impairment
  • object recognition
  • fiducial markers
  • public spaces
  • mobile accessibility
  • situational disability
  • image processing

• Friendsourcing the Unmet Needs of People with Dementia

  João Martins, José Carilho, Oliver Schnell, Carlos Duarte, Francisco M. Couto, Luís Carriço, Tiago Guerreiro (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents a system that combines automatic smartphone-based lifelogging with friendsourcing — a form of crowdsourcing limited to a trusted social network — to create a cognitive prosthesis for people with dementia (PwD). With an estimated 3…

  • dementia
  • cognitive prosthesis
  • friendsourcing
  • crowdsourcing
  • reminiscence therapy
  • caregiver support
  • social networks
  • mobile accessibility
  • lifelogging
  • aging

• Towards Web Accessibility Repair

  Nádia Fernandes (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This doctoral consortium paper presents early-stage research on automatically evaluating and repairing accessibility problems in Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). The author identifies a critical gap: as the web evolves from static pages to complex,…

  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility repair
  • rich internet applications
  • ARIA
  • WCAG 2.0
  • dynamic content
  • web development tools