Literature Reviews

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

• Accessibility Approach to Adopting Web Technologies

  Neil King, Damien McCormack (2011) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents findings from a comprehensive Australian Government-commissioned study by Vision Australia into the accessibility of the PDF format for people with disabilities. The three-phase research combined user consultation (focus groups wi…

  • PDF accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • blind and low vision
  • screen readers
  • document accessibility
  • government accessibility
  • user testing
  • accessibility policy

• Universal and Ubiquitous Web Access with Capti

  Yevgen Borodin, Andrii Sovyak, Alexander Dimitriyadi, Yury Puzis, Valentyn Melnyk, Faisal Ahmed, Glenn Dausch, I. V. Ramakrishnan (2012) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This demo paper presents Capti, a cross-platform web browsing application designed to make web access more usable for both blind and sighted users. Capti addresses two interconnected problems: the inefficiency of traditional screen readers for findin…

  • screen readers
  • assistive technology
  • blind and low vision
  • text-to-speech
  • universal design
  • mobile accessibility
  • web 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

• 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

• A Proposal to Adapt the Semiotic Inspection Method to Analyze Screen Reader Mediated Interaction

  Lucas Pedroso Carvalho, Raquel Oliveira Prates, André Pimenta Freire (2019) — Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2019)

  This paper proposes SIM-SR (Semiotic Inspection Method for Screen Reader mediated interaction), an adaptation of the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) from Semiotic Engineering theory to evaluate how screen readers mediate the communication between de…

  • semiotic engineering
  • screen readers
  • communicability
  • blind users
  • low vision
  • accessibility evaluation
  • metamessage
  • JAWS
  • Moodle

• WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On-the-Go

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Craig M. Prince, Richard E. Ladner (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2008)

  This paper introduces WebAnywhere, a web-based, self-voicing screen reader that enables blind users to access the web from virtually any computer with an Internet connection and sound output, without installing any software. The system addresses a fu…

  • screen readers
  • blind users
  • assistive technology
  • web-based
  • text-to-speech
  • public access
  • low cost
  • user study

• Enabling an Accessible Web 2.0

  Becky Gibson (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2007)

  This keynote paper from IBM's Becky Gibson examines the accessibility challenges created by the emergence of Web 2.0 and the technologies being developed to address them. Written at a pivotal moment in web history, the paper describes how the shift f…

  • ARIA
  • Web 2.0
  • JavaScript
  • DHTML
  • accessibility APIs
  • keyboard navigation
  • screen readers
  • toolkits
  • dynamic content

• Experimental Evaluation of Usability and Accessibility of Heading Elements

  Takayuki Watanabe (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This study by Takayuki Watanabe of Tokyo Woman's Christian University provides empirical evidence for something the accessibility community has long advocated: that proper semantic markup of heading elements (h1-h6) significantly improves both usabil…

  • semantic HTML
  • heading elements
  • screen readers
  • usability testing
  • blindness
  • content structure
  • web standards
  • user study

• Ajax Live Regions: Chat as a Case Example

  Peter Thiessen, Charles Chen (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents one of the earliest practical implementations of WAI-ARIA live regions, using an accessible Ajax chat application called Reef Chat as a proof of concept. The authors — Peter Thiessen from the University of Toronto's Adaptive Techn…

  • WAI-ARIA
  • ARIA live regions
  • AJAX
  • Web 2.0
  • screen readers
  • dynamic content
  • chat accessibility
  • assistive technology

• Enabling Access to Geo-referenced Information: Atlas.txt

  Kavita E. Thomas, Livia Sumegi, Leo Ferres, Somayajulu Sripada (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Aberdeen and Carleton University presents Atlas.txt, a data-to-text natural language generation (NLG) system designed to make geo-referenced data — such as census maps and thematic choropleth maps — accessible to vis…

  • natural language generation
  • visual impairment
  • data accessibility
  • geographic information
  • data visualization
  • screen readers
  • census data