Literature Reviews

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

• Guidelines, Icons and Marketable Skills: An Accessibility Evaluation of 100 Web Development Company Homepages

  Teresa D. Gilbertson, Colin H. C. Machin (2012) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This study examined whether web development companies that market accessibility as a skill actually practice what they preach, by evaluating the homepages of 100 UK web development companies selected from Google searches across four geographic region…

  • web accessibility
  • WCAG compliance
  • developer awareness
  • conformance testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • web development
  • accessibility policy

• Methodology for Identifying and Solving Accessibility Related Issues in Web Content Management System Environments

  Juan Miguel López, Afra Pascual, Cristina Menduiña, Toni Granollers (2012) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents a nine-step iterative methodology for identifying and resolving accessibility issues in web content management system (CMS) environments. The authors address the growing problem that while CMSs like OpenCMS and Typo3 enable non-te…

  • content management systems
  • WCAG compliance
  • ATAG
  • web accessibility
  • evaluation methods
  • authoring tools
  • CMS accessibility

• Firefixia: An Accessibility Web Browser Customization Toolbar for People with Dyslexia

  Vagner Figueredo de Santana, Rosimeire de Oliveira, Leonelo Dell Anhol Almeida, Marcia Ito (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents Firefixia, a Mozilla Firefox browser extension toolbar designed to help people with dyslexia customise the presentation of web content according to their individual preferences. The authors note that while web accessibility effort…

  • dyslexia
  • web accessibility
  • browser extension
  • customization
  • assistive technology
  • reading accessibility
  • user testing
  • cognitive accessibility

• Accessibility Assessment of Violations on the Stack Overflow Platform

  Ingrid M. Miranda da Silva, Luciano Arruda Teran, Marcelle Pereira Mota (2022) — Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)

  This study investigates whether code snippets shared on Stack Overflow — one of the world's most popular developer Q&A platforms with over 120 million monthly visitors — follow web accessibility guidelines. The researchers built a tool called A11y Re…

  • web accessibility
  • repository mining
  • software development
  • code quality
  • WCAG compliance
  • developer awareness
  • automated testing
  • HTML
  • CSS

• Layout Guidelines for Web Text and a Web Service to Improve Accessibility for Dyslexics

  Luz Rello, Gaurang Kanvinde, Ricardo Baeza-Yates (2012) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents evidence-based layout guidelines for making web text more readable for people with dyslexia, derived from a user study with 22 dyslexic participants and a matched control group. The study is notable for being the first to combine …

  • dyslexia
  • readability
  • typography
  • eye tracking
  • text presentation
  • web accessibility
  • cognitive accessibility
  • color contrast
  • font size
  • line spacing

• User Individuality Management in Websites Based on WAI-ARIA Annotations and Ontologies

  Xabier Valencia, Myriam Arrue, J. Eduardo Pérez, Julio Abascal (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents a comprehensive system for automatically adapting websites to individual users' accessibility needs using WAI-ARIA-based annotations and an ontology that models users, adaptation techniques, and their relationships. Unlike previou…

  • WAI-ARIA
  • personalization
  • web accessibility
  • adaptive interfaces
  • ontology
  • content adaptation
  • user modeling
  • cognitive accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • motor accessibility

• Website Accessibility in Australia and the Australian Government's National Transition Strategy

  Vivienne L. Conway (2011) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This short research proposal paper outlines a planned study to assess the effectiveness of Australia's Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy (NTS), released by the Australian Government in June 2010. The NTS mandated that all federal governm…

  • web accessibility
  • policy
  • WCAG compliance
  • government
  • accessibility standards
  • e-government
  • accessibility assessment
  • global accessibility

• Efficient and Effective Information Finding on Small Screen Devices

  Pauli P. Y. Lai (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper proposes a reverse engineering approach for automatically adapting desktop-oriented webpages for efficient information seeking on small-screen mobile devices. The core contribution is a "semantic-DOM tree" model that analyzes the relations…

  • mobile accessibility
  • content adaptation
  • responsive design
  • web accessibility
  • information architecture
  • semantic HTML
  • machine learning

• Size Matters (Spacing Not): 18 Points for a Dyslexic-Friendly Wikipedia

  Luz Rello, Martin Pielot, Mari-Carmen Marcos, Roberto Carlini (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper investigates the effect of font size and line spacing on readability and comprehension for people with dyslexia, tested in the real-world context of Wikipedia articles rather than isolated text samples. The authors conducted an eye-trackin…

  • dyslexia
  • typography
  • readability
  • eye tracking
  • font size
  • line spacing
  • text presentation
  • cognitive accessibility
  • web accessibility

• Web accessibility snapshot: an effort to reveal coding guidelines conformance

  Vagner Figueredo de Santana, Rogério Abreu de Paula (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents the first iteration of the Web Accessibility Snapshot (WAS) project, a large-scale automated evaluation of web accessibility conformance across two sets of 1,000 websites each: the Alexa top 1,000 most popular sites and a randomly…

  • automated testing
  • WCAG compliance
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility metrics
  • web standards
  • large-scale evaluation