Literature Reviews

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

• OPTIMAL-EM: Complexity-Driven Clustering for Optimised Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2026) — ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 20, No. 2

  Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper (University of Manchester and METU-NCC) extend their OPTIMAL-EM methodology for large-scale web accessibility conformance evaluation. The problem they address is fundamental to professional auditing: the W3C's Webs…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG-EM
  • OPTIMAL-EM
  • representative sampling
  • web page complexity
  • clustering
  • DBSCAN
  • t-SNE
  • machine learning
  • audit methodology
  • automated testing

• FormA11y — Research and Development of a Tool for Remediating PDF Forms for Accessibility

  Sparsh Paliwal, Joshua Hoeflich, J. Bern Jordan, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I. Morariu, Alexa Siu, Jonathan Lazar (2025) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 32, No. 1

  Paliwal and colleagues — a team spanning the University of Maryland's Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility (MIDA), Northwestern, and Adobe Research — tackle a problem that has been largely overlooked in PDF accessibility research: the remedi…

  • PDF accessibility
  • PDF forms
  • PDF/UA
  • document accessibility
  • remediation tools
  • born-accessible
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • machine learning
  • usability study
  • accessibility tooling

• A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Martin Jansche, Matt Huenerfauth, Noémie Elhadad (2010) — Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '10), Posters

  Feng et al. (2010) is a computational-linguistics paper that compares a wide variety of text features for automatically predicting the grade level of reading material aimed at primary-school students. The motivation is both intrinsic — traditional re…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • natural language processing
  • machine learning
  • language models
  • computational linguistics
  • POS features
  • discourse features
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • entity grid
  • coreference
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • grade level prediction
  • reading level
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • support vector machines
  • classification

• Modeling Expertise in Assistive Navigation Interfaces for Blind People

  Eshed Ohn-Bar, João Guerreiro, Dragan Ahmetovic, Kris M. Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2018) — Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)

  This short IUI paper asks a question most assistive-navigation research leaves unasked: what happens as a blind user becomes an expert on a route? Existing smartphone guidance apps deliver the same instruction set on a user's tenth trip down a corrid…

  • blind navigation
  • indoor navigation
  • turn-by-turn navigation
  • visual impairment
  • blindness
  • assistive technology
  • personalization
  • adaptive interface
  • user modeling
  • machine learning
  • deep learning
  • recurrent neural network
  • LSTM
  • route learning
  • mobile accessibility
  • orientation and mobility

• Automated tactile graphics translation: in the field

  Chandrika Jayant, Matt Renzelmann, Dana Wen, Satria Krisnandi, Richard Ladner, Dan Comden (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper describes two years of field work extending the Tactile Graphics Assistant (TGA), a system developed at the University of Washington to automate the translation of figures from mathematics, science, and engineering (STEM) textbooks into em…

  • tactile graphics
  • Braille
  • STEM accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • image processing
  • machine learning
  • OCR
  • automated alternative formats
  • mathematical accessibility
  • accessible publishing

• Comparing speaker-dependent and speaker-adaptive acoustic models for recognizing dysarthric speech

  Frank Rudzicz (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from Frank Rudzicz at the University of Toronto compares two strategies for building automatic speech recognition (ASR) acoustic models that work for people with dysarthria — a set of motor speech disorders that produces…

  • dysarthria
  • automatic speech recognition
  • acoustic model
  • speaker adaptation
  • hidden Markov model
  • phoneme
  • speech intelligibility
  • motor speech disorders
  • machine learning
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • speech accessibility
  • voice interface

• Information overload in non-visual web transaction: context analysis spells relief

  Jalal Mahmud (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster paper from Jalal Mahmud at Stony Brook University describes ongoing PhD research into reducing the information overload that blind users experience when completing multi-step web transactions — shopping, registrations, b…

  • screen readers
  • non-visual web access
  • web page segmentation
  • context analysis
  • web transactions
  • information overload
  • blindness and low vision
  • VoiceXML
  • machine learning
  • support vector machine
  • web accessibility
  • JAWS
  • IBM Home Page Reader

• Improving Accessibility of HTML Documents by Generating Image-Tags in a Proxy

  Daniel Keysers, Marius Renn, Thomas M. Breuel (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Technical University Kaiserslautern presents a system that automatically generates ALT tags for images on web pages by analysing image contents through a web proxy. The…

  • automatic alt text
  • image accessibility
  • web accessibility
  • computer vision
  • image retrieval
  • web proxy
  • content-based image retrieval
  • screen readers
  • machine learning

• Automatically Generating Custom User Interfaces for Users with Physical Disabilities

  Krzysztof Z. Gajos, Jing Jing Long, Daniel S. Weld (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper presents SUPPLE, a system that automatically generates custom graphical user interfaces tailored to individual users' physical capabilities. Standard desktop GUIs are optimised for typical users interacting via keyboard, mouse, and standar…

  • adaptive interface
  • automatic UI generation
  • motor impairment
  • visual impairment
  • machine learning
  • personalisation
  • optimisation
  • physical disability

• 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