Literature Reviews

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

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Repository for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2009) — ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Summer 2009

  This short SIGWEB Newsletter article proposes Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared federated repository for externally authored web-accessibility metadata. The authors argue that accessibility cannot scale as long as fixes depend on the original site…

  • web accessibility
  • metadata
  • semantic transcoding
  • social accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • assistive technology
  • blindness and low vision

• Sasayaki: Augmented Voice Web Browsing Experience

  Daisuke Sato, Shaojian Zhu, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2011) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)

  This paper introduces Sasayaki (Japanese for 'whisper'), a prototype that augments the standard screen-reader voice with a second, physically separated synthesised voice that whispers contextually relevant hints — for example 'entering main content',…

  • screen readers
  • auditory interface
  • voice browser
  • web accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • assistive technology
  • multimodal
  • speech technology

• SAMBA: a semi-automatic method for measuring barriers of accessibility

  Giorgio Brajnik, Raffaella Lomuscio (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Brajnik and Lomuscio argue that web accessibility cannot be managed without being measured, yet existing accessibility metrics are underdeveloped and almost universally tied to conformance with WCAG checkpoints rather than to the real-world barriers …

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility metrics
  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility testing
  • conformance testing
  • barrier walkthrough
  • expert review
  • automated testing
  • quality assurance

• Developing usable CAPTCHAs for blind users

  Jonathan Holman, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, John D'Arcy (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from a Towson University team led by Jonathan Lazar — joined by Jonathan Holman, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and John D'Arcy of Notre Dame — addresses the long-standing accessibility problem that text-based CAPTCHAs (the distort…

  • CAPTCHA
  • audio CAPTCHA
  • blindness and low vision
  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • security
  • usability
  • universal usability
  • Turing test
  • visual impairment
  • multimodal
  • JAWS
  • Window-Eyes

• 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 the outcomes of students with cognitive and learning disabilities: phase I development for a web accessibility tool

  Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by Web…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive disabilities
  • learning disabilities
  • cognitive load
  • evaluation tools
  • WAVE
  • WebAIM
  • web accessibility
  • students
  • education
  • automated testing

• SADIe: exposing implicit information to improve accessibility

  Darren Lunn (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Darren Lunn's Assets '07 demonstration paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a transcoding system from the University of Manchester that uses Semantic Web ontologies to expose the implicit visual str…

  • web accessibility
  • transcoding
  • semantic web
  • ontology
  • CSS
  • screen readers
  • visual impairment
  • accessibility evaluation
  • randomisation test
  • single-subject design

• Effects of sampling methods on web accessibility evaluations

  Giorgio Brajnik, Andrea Mulas, Claudia Pitton (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Brajnik, Mulas, and Pitton's Assets '07 paper is a large, careful empirical investigation of the sampling step in web-accessibility evaluation — the step at which an evaluator picks which pages of a site to actually test. For any site above a trivial…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • sampling methods
  • accessibility metrics
  • conformance testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • quality assurance
  • research methodology
  • accessibility audit

• Feedback-based evaluation tool for web accessibility

  Daisuke Asai, Masahiro Watanabe, Yoko Asano (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories proposes a feedback-driven approach to improving automated web-accessibility evaluation tools. The authors frame the familiar problem that automated checkers such as Bobb…

  • web accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • crowdsourcing
  • WCAG
  • accessibility tools
  • evaluation rules

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney…

  • multimedia
  • streaming media
  • flash
  • DHTML
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • metadata
  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • audio interference
  • keyboard navigation