Literature Reviews — A11y Paradise

Privacy Concerns for Visual Assistance Technologies

Abigale Stangl, Kristina Shiroma, Nathan Davis, Bo Xie, Kenneth R. Fleischmann, Leah Findlater, Danna Gurari (2022) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This comprehensive study examines privacy concerns of blind users when sharing images and videos with visual assistance technologies (VATs) like Aira, Be My Eyes, and Seeing AI. The research addresses a fundamental tension: blind people must share vi…

BrowseWithMe: An Online Clothes Shopping Assistant for People with Visual Impairments

Abigale J. Stangl, Esha Kothari, Suyog D. Jain, Tom Yeh, Kristen Grauman, Danna Gurari (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

This paper from the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Texas at Austin addresses the inaccessibility of online clothes shopping for people with visual impairments through both empirical investigation and a prototype AI-powered assistant…

Crowdsourcing Platform for Workplace Accessibility

Hironobu Takagi, Akihiro Kosugi, Shin Saito, Masayoshi Teraguchi (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper from IBM Research Tokyo proposes Crowd Card, an intra-organizational crowdsourcing platform designed to improve workplace accessibility while maintaining confidentiality of business materials. The core problem is that modern workplaces are…

Semantic Content Analysis Supporting Web Accessibility Evaluation

Carlos Duarte, Inês Matos, Luís Carriço (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

This paper addresses a fundamental limitation of automated web accessibility evaluation tools: their inability to assess whether text alternatives actually describe the content they refer to. While tools can detect the presence of an alt attribute on…

Making GIFs Accessible

Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Himalini Gururaj, Kris Kitani, Jeffrey Bigham (2020) — Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020)

This Carnegie Mellon University study examines the accessibility of GIFs on social media, a visual medium that has become central to online conversation but remains largely inaccessible to people with vision impairments. The researchers conducted a m…

Going Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Image Descriptions to Satisfy the Information Wants of People Who are Blind or Have Low Vision

Abigale Stangl, Nitin Verma, Kenneth R. Fleischmann, Meredith Ringel Morris, Danna Gurari (2021) — ASSETS '21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

Current image description practices typically produce a single, one-size-fits-all description for each image, yet the same image can appear across vastly different contexts — news websites, e-commerce platforms, social media feeds, travel sites, and …

AIDE: Automatic and Accessible Image Descriptions for Review Imagery in Online Retail

Rachana Sreedhar, Nicole Tan, Jingyue Zhang, Kim Jin, Spencer Gregson, Eli Moreta-Feliz, Niveditha Samudrala, Shrenik Sadalgi (2022) — Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

This paper from the Wayfair Next team presents AIDE (Automatic Image Description Engine), a multi-modal system that automatically generates alt-text for user-submitted review photos on e-commerce sites. While product images on retail sites sometimes …

ImageExplorer Deployment: Understanding Text-Based and Touch-Based Image Exploration in the Wild

Ruolin Xu, Yuxuan Cai, Shuying Hou, Yu-Jung Chang, Anhong Guo (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

This paper presents the real-world deployment and evaluation of ImageExplorer, an iOS application that enables blind and low-vision users to explore images through two complementary modalities: text-based sequential exploration and touch-based spatia…