Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
43 results found tagged alternative text.
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An Uninteresting Tour Through Why Our Research Papers Aren't Accessible
This paper provides a candid examination of why academic research papers, delivered almost exclusively as PDFs, remain largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. The authors — who have spent years actively trying to improve the situation — tra…
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"It's almost like they're trying to hide it": How User-Provided Image Descriptions Have Failed to Make Twitter Accessible
This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of how Twitter's opt-in image description feature (launched in 2016) has affected the accessibility of images on the platform. The researchers analyzed 1.09 million tweets with images collecte…
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Twitter A11y: A Browser Extension to Make Twitter Images Accessible
This paper presents Twitter A11y, a browser extension designed to address the widespread lack of alternative text on images posted to Twitter. The authors note that while around 12% of Twitter content consists of images, only 0.1% of those images inc…
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Evaluating the Accessibility of Line Graphs through Textual Summaries for Visually Impaired Users
This paper presents the SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually) system, which automatically generates natural language summaries of line graphs found in online popular media articles such as newspapers and magazines. The system addresses a…
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Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental crowdsourced service from IBM Research-Tokyo that enables volunteers to fix web accessibility problems without requiring site owners to modify their pages. L…
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From Automation to User Empowerment: Investigating the Role of a Semi-automatic Tool in Social Media Accessibility
This paper presents SONAAR (Social Networks Accessible Authoring), a semi-automatic tool designed to improve social media accessibility by combining AI-powered image recognition with user-generated descriptions. The research addresses a persistent pr…
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The Status of Using "Big Eye" Chinese Screen Reader on "Wretch" Blog in Taiwan
This short paper examines the accessibility of Wretch Blog (wretch.cc), one of the most popular blogging platforms in Taiwan, when used with "Big Eye," a Chinese-language screen reader. The authors find that most core functionality of the blog works …
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Accessible Image File Formats: The Need and the Way (Position Paper)
This position paper from IBM India argues that existing WCAG guidelines for image accessibility (alt text, longdesc, image maps) are insufficient because they rely on voluntary compliance by content authors and cannot address scenarios where images a…
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Accessibility in Non-Professional Web Authoring Tools: A Missed Web 2.0 Opportunity?
This paper from the University of York evaluates the accessibility of Apple's iWeb, a non-professional web authoring tool representative of a new generation of Web 2.0 design applications aimed at non-technical users creating personal websites, blogs…
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Accessible Blog Posts with Windows Live Writer
This short paper from Microsoft describes how Windows Live Writer, a desktop blogging application installed on over 20 million machines with approximately 100,000 daily active users, was designed to produce accessible HTML output without requiring au…