Literature Reviews

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

• Human Diversity and the Choice of Interface: A Design Challenge

  Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Murray Turoff (1981) — Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Easier and More Productive Use of Computer Systems (CHI '81), Part II: Human Interface and the User Interface

  Hiltz and Turoff report findings from a multi-year National Science Foundation-funded field trial of the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES), a pioneering computer-mediated communication platform built at the New Jersey Institute of Technol…

  • user interface
  • computer-mediated communication
  • adaptive interface
  • personalization
  • novice vs expert
  • user support
  • historical
  • interface design
  • human diversity

• 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

• Variability in Reactions to Instructional Guidance during Smartphone-Based Assisted Navigation of Blind Users

  Eshed Ohn-Bar, João Guerreiro, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2018) — Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)

  This paper takes a close, sensor-level look at something most indoor-navigation research glosses over: how differently individual blind users actually react to the same spoken instruction. The authors instrumented a smartphone-and-BLE-beacon turn-by-…

  • indoor navigation
  • turn-by-turn navigation
  • blindness
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • orientation and mobility
  • personalization
  • adaptive interface
  • motion analysis
  • reaction time
  • mobile accessibility
  • wayfinding
  • user variability
  • cane technique
  • Bluetooth Low Energy

• The Personal Portable Profile Project

  Blaise W. Liffick, Gary Zoppetti, Shane Shearer (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper presents the Personal Portable Profile (P3) system, a hardware and software solution designed to let users with disabilities carry their computer accessibility settings between machines. The core problem addressed is that operating system …

  • assistive technology
  • user profile
  • personalization
  • portable accessibility
  • operating system settings
  • USB device

• Toward Goldilocks' Pointing Device: Determining a "Just Right" Gain Setting for Users with Physical Impairments

  Heidi Horstmann Koester, Edmund LoPresti, Richard C. Simpson (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This paper describes the design and evaluation of the Input Device Agent (IDA), a software-based agent that automatically recommends a pointing device gain (control-display sensitivity) setting for individual users with physical impairments. Gain det…

  • motor accessibility
  • pointing devices
  • adaptive systems
  • physical disability
  • cursor control
  • assistive technology
  • personalization

• Semantic Bookmarking for Non-Visual Web Access

  Saikat Mukherjee, I. V. Ramakrishnan, Michael Kifer (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

  This paper introduces semantic bookmarking, a technique for non-visual web access that allows blind users to bookmark meaningful content segments on web pages using domain ontologies rather than structural HTML positions. The research is built on Hea…

  • web accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • screen reader
  • semantic web
  • web navigation
  • bookmarking
  • personalization
  • information retrieval
  • ontology

• A Web Accessibility Service: Update and Findings

  Vicki L. Hanson, John T. Richards (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

  This paper reports on the evolution of IBM's Web Accessibility Service from a proxy server prototype (presented at Assets 2002) to a client-side architecture that transforms web pages on the fly to meet the needs of older adults and people with disab…

  • web accessibility
  • web adaptation
  • aging
  • assistive technology
  • personalization
  • content adaptation
  • browser accessibility
  • user interface
  • web transcoding

• Automating Accessibility: The Dynamic Keyboard

  Shari Trewin (2004) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets 04)

  This paper presents the Dynamic Keyboard, a self-adaptive software agent developed at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center that continuously and automatically adjusts keyboard accessibility settings to match the current user's typing patterns. The syste…

  • keyboard accessibility
  • adaptive systems
  • motor accessibility
  • input methods
  • self-adaptive system
  • personalization
  • assistive technology
  • Parkinsons disease

• Image Pre-Compensation to Facilitate Computer Access for Users with Refractive Errors

  Miguel Alonso, Armando Barreto, J. Gualberto Cremades (2003) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '04)

  This paper presents a novel approach to improving computer access for people with refractive visual errors by pre-compensating displayed images using knowledge of the user's specific optical aberration. The core insight is that the human eye can be m…

  • low vision
  • visual impairment
  • refractive error
  • image processing
  • visual acuity
  • computer vision
  • personalization
  • display technology
  • assistive technology

• An Empirical Investigation of Ways in Which Some of the Problems Encountered by Some Dyslexics May Be Alleviated Using Computer Techniques

  Peter Gregor, Alan F. Newell (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper describes the development and user evaluation of a highly configurable word processing environment designed to help dyslexic users read and produce text more effectively. The researchers at the University of Dundee identified nine common p…

  • dyslexia
  • reading accessibility
  • text customization
  • user-centred design
  • word processing
  • cognitive accessibility
  • personalization