Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
276 results found tagged blindness.
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Data Sonification for Screen-Reader Users: When and When Not to Use
This paper from the University of Washington assesses when data sonification — non-speech audio representations of data visualizations — is and is not beneficial for screen-reader users. Despite sonification dating back to 1974 and growing adoption i…
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Developing a Wearable Tactile Prototype to Support Situational Awareness
This doctoral consortium paper from UMBC describes dissertation research into head-mounted tactile displays for spatial and situational awareness, with applications for people who are blind and those experiencing situational impairments. The research…
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An empirical investigation of the situationally-induced impairments experienced by blind mobile device users
This paper investigates the situationally-induced impairments and disabilities (SIIDs) experienced by blind people when using mobile devices in real-world contexts. While prior SIID research has focused on sighted users encountering temporary impedim…
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AudioDraw: User Preferences in Non-Visual Diagram Drawing for Touchscreens
This paper investigates how people who are blind can independently create visual diagrams on touchscreen tablets, addressing a significant gap in accessibility. Diagram-building features in productivity tools like MS Word, PowerPoint, and UML editors…
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NavCog: Turn-by-Turn Smartphone Navigation Assistant for People with Visual Impairments or Blindness
This extended abstract presents NavCog, an open-source iOS smartphone navigation system designed to assist people with visual impairments or blindness in navigating complex indoor and outdoor environments. While many blind people can independently tr…
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Assessment of Semantic Taxonomies for Blind Indoor Navigation Based on a Shopping Center Use Case
This paper investigates what environmental information is needed to support effective indoor navigation for visually impaired people, and whether existing geographic data specifications provide adequate semantic vocabularies for this purpose. The res…
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Sensory Glasses for the Visually Impaired
This demonstration paper presents the design and development of a low-cost wearable assistive device — sensory glasses — intended to help visually impaired people navigate their surroundings. The device addresses a well-known limitation of the tradit…
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Making Real-World Interfaces Accessible Through Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Fabrication
This demonstration paper presents two complementary systems designed to make inaccessible physical interfaces usable by blind people: VizLens and Facade. The research addresses a fundamental and long-standing accessibility problem — the vast majority…
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ChattyBooks and ChattyBook Service
This demonstration paper presents ChattyBooks, a Windows application that converts STEM content in DAISY/accessible EPUB3 format into audio-embedded HTML5 with JavaScript, enabling playback in any web browser on any platform without requiring special…
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Achieving Practical and Accurate Indoor Navigation for People with Visual Impairments
This paper presents improvements to the NavCog indoor navigation system that achieve sub-meter localization accuracy for blind pedestrians while significantly reducing the infrastructure cost of deploying BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) beacon networks. G…