Literature Reviews

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

• Eye-Tracking-Driven Shared Control for Robotic Arms: Wizard of Oz Studies to Assess Design Choices

  Anke Fischer-Janzen, Thomas M. Wendt, Daniel Görlich, Kristof Van Laerhoven (2026) — ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

  The paper presents two Wizard of Oz studies evaluating an eye-tracking-driven shared-control system for an assistive robotic arm — the 7-DoF Kinova Gen3 — designed for People with Severe Motor Disabilities (PSMD). PSMD here includes people with locke…

  • assistive robotics
  • eye tracking
  • gaze input
  • shared control
  • motor disability
  • activities of daily living
  • human-robot interaction
  • wizard of oz
  • participatory design

• Towards Handicapping for Online Competitive Video Games: A Taxonomical Review of Intervention Studies

  Pete Gordon, William Kavanagh, Thomas Howson, David Lavallee (2026) — ACM Games

  The paper addresses how skill disparities in online competitive video games create a "playerbase-diminishing feedback effect": weaker players suffer repeated defeats and quit, leaving the next tier to become the new bottom — a cycle that ultimately r…

  • game accessibility
  • accessible gaming
  • inclusive design
  • literature review
  • player experience
  • competitive gaming
  • matchmaking

• Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Interactions with Adults with Intellectual Disabilities and Robots

  Saminda Sundeepa Balasuriya, Laurianne Sitbon, Alicia Mitchell (2026) — Journal of Human-Robot Interaction

  This qualitative study re-analyses video data from two prior field studies with an Australian disability service organisation, in which adults with intellectual disabilities interacted with two commercially available social robots: Pepper, a 120 cm h…

  • intellectual disability
  • human-robot interaction
  • social robots
  • anthropomorphism
  • inclusive design
  • qualitative research
  • thematic analysis
  • co-design

• Towards Testing the Accessibility of Dynamic Visual Changes in Android Mobile GUI with Multi-Modal LLMs

  Mengxi Zhang, Jianlin Yu, Chen Xu, Jiqun Li, Xinglong Yin, Huaxiao Liu (2026) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This paper addresses a long-standing gap in mobile accessibility testing: dynamic visual changes in Android GUIs that communicate task status or feedback to sighted users but are invisible to blind users of screen readers such as TalkBack. Examples i…

  • Android
  • mobile accessibility
  • screen readers
  • TalkBack
  • automated testing
  • large language models
  • GPT-4o
  • blind users
  • dynamic content
  • GUI testing
  • prompt engineering

• AXECC: Benchmarking the Privacy and Accessibility Impact of Browser Extensions

  James Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini (2026) — ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

  This paper presents AXECC, a novel automated framework for jointly measuring the web-tracking behaviour and accessibility impact of browser extensions at scale. The authors argue that while browser extensions are widely installed to improve the brows…

  • browser extensions
  • web tracking
  • privacy
  • accessibility testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • WAVE
  • Lighthouse
  • dark mode
  • screen readers
  • assistive technology

• AccessQuest: A Game-Based Approach to Digital Accessibility Education

  P D Parthasarathy, Swaroop Joshi (2026) — ACM Transactions on Computing Education

  Parthasarathy and Joshi present AccessQuest, a single-player, role-playing platformer that teaches five WCAG 2.1 Level A success criteria — text alternatives (1.1.1), captions for pre-recorded content (1.2.2), transcripts for audio-only content (1.2.…

  • accessibility education
  • game-based learning
  • serious games
  • WCAG
  • computing education
  • gamification
  • design-based research
  • role-playing game
  • higher education

• Accessibility Education for Software Engineers: Evaluating the Impact of Game-Based Learning

  P D Parthasarathy, Swaroop Joshi (2026) — ACM Transactions on Computing Education

  Parthasarathy and Joshi address a persistent industry problem: despite 25 years of WCAG, only 5.2% of top web homepages fully conform, and organizations consistently report that staff lack accessibility skills. Academic curricula are slowly integrati…

  • accessibility education
  • game-based learning
  • serious games
  • WCAG
  • software engineering
  • gamification
  • workplace training
  • design-based research

• OPTIMAL-EM: Complexity-Driven Clustering for Optimised Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2026) — ACM Transactions on the Web, Vol. 20, No. 2

  Hambley, Yesilada, Vigo, and Harper (University of Manchester and METU-NCC) extend their OPTIMAL-EM methodology for large-scale web accessibility conformance evaluation. The problem they address is fundamental to professional auditing: the W3C's Webs…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG-EM
  • OPTIMAL-EM
  • representative sampling
  • web page complexity
  • clustering
  • DBSCAN
  • t-SNE
  • machine learning
  • audit methodology
  • automated testing

• FormA11y — Research and Development of a Tool for Remediating PDF Forms for Accessibility

  Sparsh Paliwal, Joshua Hoeflich, J. Bern Jordan, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I. Morariu, Alexa Siu, Jonathan Lazar (2025) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 32, No. 1

  Paliwal and colleagues — a team spanning the University of Maryland's Maryland Initiative for Digital Accessibility (MIDA), Northwestern, and Adobe Research — tackle a problem that has been largely overlooked in PDF accessibility research: the remedi…

  • PDF accessibility
  • PDF forms
  • PDF/UA
  • document accessibility
  • remediation tools
  • born-accessible
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • machine learning
  • usability study
  • accessibility tooling

• The Intelligent Voice-Interactive Interface

  Christopher Schmandt, Eric A. Hulteen (1982) — Proceedings of the 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '82)

  Schmandt and Hulteen describe the 'Put That There' system built at MIT's Architecture Machine Group (the precursor to the Media Lab), one of the earliest working implementations of a conversational, multimodal human–computer interface. Seated in a ch…

  • speech recognition
  • voice interface
  • multimodal interaction
  • gesture recognition
  • historical
  • natural language interface
  • redundant input
  • accessible input