Literature Reviews

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

• On the Intelligibility of Fast Synthesized Speech for Individuals with Early-Onset Blindness

  Amanda Stent, Ann Syrdal, Taniya Mishra (2011) — Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2011)

  This paper reports on a pilot experiment comparing the intelligibility of fast synthesized speech across different text-to-speech (TTS) systems for individuals with early-onset blindness (onset before age seven). People who are blind increasingly use…

  • text-to-speech
  • screen readers
  • blindness
  • speech technology
  • speech intelligibility
  • assistive technology

• Reconstruction of Phonated Speech from Whispers Using Formant-Derived Plausible Pitch Modulation

  Ian V. McLoughlin, Hamid Reza Sharifzadeh, Su Lim Tan, Jingjie Li, Yan Song (2015) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper addresses a fundamental communication barrier for people who can only whisper due to voice impairments. While whispering is an occasional choice for most people, it is the primary—sometimes only—communication method for partial laryngectom…

  • speech technology
  • voice reconstruction
  • laryngectomy
  • voice disorders
  • whisper-to-speech
  • assistive technology
  • speech prosthesis

• Individuality-Preserving Voice Conversion for Articulation Disorders Using Phoneme-Categorized Exemplars

  Ryo Aihara, Tetsuya Takiguchi, Yasuo Ariki (2015) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a voice conversion system designed to improve speech intelligibility for people with articulation disorders resulting from athetoid cerebral palsy, while critically preserving the speaker's voice individuality. Cerebral palsy affe…

  • voice conversion
  • articulation disorders
  • cerebral palsy
  • speech technology
  • assistive technology
  • motor speech disorders
  • signal processing