Literature Reviews

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

• Transforming Flash to XML for Accessibility Evaluations

  Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper from IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory proposes a method for transforming Flash content into XML structures to enable automated accessibility evaluation. At the time of publication, Flash was installed on over 95% of personal computers and was…

  • Flash accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • XML transformation
  • MSAA

• Functional Web Accessibility Techniques and Tools from the University of Illinois

  Jon Gunderson, Hadi Bargi Rangin, Nicholas Hoyt (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper presents two complementary tools developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for helping web developers create functionally accessible websites: the CITES/DRES Functional Web Accessibility Best Practices and associated eval…

  • web accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG
  • Section 508
  • browser extension
  • best practices
  • dynamic HTML

• Accessibility Evaluation based on Machine Learning Technique

  Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper from IBM Tokyo Research Lab proposes using machine learning to evaluate the accessibility of presentation documents, addressing a gap where traditional rule-based checking tools are insufficient. The authors argue that presentation documen…

  • automated testing
  • machine learning
  • presentation accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • support vector machine
  • visual features

• Programmer-Focused Website Accessibility Evaluations

  Chris Law, Julie Jacko, Paula Edwards (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This paper argues that accessibility evaluation and reporting processes have historically focused on the needs of end-users with disabilities while overlooking the actual audience for evaluation reports: the programmers who must implement the fixes. …

  • accessibility evaluation
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility reporting
  • developer tools
  • organizational accessibility
  • WCAG
  • automated testing

• Accessibility of Internet Websites through Time

  Stephanie Hackett, Bambang Parmanto, Xiaoming Zeng (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

  This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of web accessibility from 1997 to 2002 using archived snapshots from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The researchers evaluated 240 archived instances of random websites (40 per year from the Alexa t…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • longitudinal study
  • WCAG
  • Section 508
  • web complexity
  • government websites
  • metrics
  • automated testing

• Accessibility Designer: Visualizing Usability for the Blind

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda, Junji Maeda (2003) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '04)

  This paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory presents Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), a tool that goes beyond conventional accessibility checkers by visualising the usability of web pages for blind screen reader users rather than merely checki…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility testing
  • screen reader
  • blindness and low vision
  • accessibility tools
  • usability
  • automated testing
  • skip navigation
  • alt text
  • heading hierarchy
  • accessibility evaluation

• A Novel Multi-Stage Approach to the Detection of Visuo-Spatial Neglect Based on the Analysis of Figure-Copying Tasks

  R. M. Guest, M. C. Fairhurst (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '02)

  This paper presents a computer-based technique for improving the detection of visuo-spatial neglect (VSN), a dysfunction typically caused by stroke that causes patients to fail to respond to stimuli on the opposite side of the visual field from the b…

  • stroke recovery
  • neurological conditions
  • clinical tools
  • assessment
  • automated testing
  • rehabilitation
  • visuo-spatial neglect
  • occupational therapy
  • computer vision

• Evaluating Web Resources for Disability Access

  Murray Rowan, Peter Gregor, David Sloan, Paul Booth (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from the University of Dundee's Digital Media Access Group argues that existing accessibility evaluation methods in 2000 were individually insufficient and proposes a comprehensive meta-methodology that combines multiple evaluation techniq…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility audit
  • automated testing
  • manual testing
  • heuristic evaluation
  • WCAG
  • web accessibility
  • evaluation methodology
  • usability testing
  • assistive technology testing

• Monitoring Accessibility: Large Scale Evaluations at a Geo Political Level

  Silvia Mirri, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Paola Salomoni (2011) — The Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper presents AMA (Accessibility Monitoring Application), a system designed to monitor web accessibility across large collections of URLs from a geo-political perspective. Developed as part of the VaMoLà project — a collaboration between the Em…

  • web accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • policy
  • compliance
  • governance
  • metrics
  • data visualization

• Increasing Web Accessibility by Automatically Judging Alternative Text Quality

  Jeffrey P. Bigham (2007) — Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2007)

  This paper presents a machine learning classifier that can automatically judge whether alternative text assigned to web images is appropriate or inappropriate, using contextual features rather than visual analysis of the image itself. The research ad…

  • alternative text
  • web accessibility
  • machine learning
  • screen readers
  • automated testing
  • image accessibility
  • blind and low vision