Literature Reviews

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

• Collecting a Motion-Capture Corpus of American Sign Language for Data-Driven Generation Research

  Pengfei Lu, Matt Huenerfauth (2010) — Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT '10)

  This workshop paper describes the first year of a multi-year project at CUNY to build a motion-capture corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) specifically intended to support data-driven ASL animation and machine-translation research. The authors arg…

  • American Sign Language
  • ASL animation
  • motion capture
  • sign language corpus
  • deaf accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • signing avatar
  • data-driven generation
  • computational linguistics
  • sign language machine translation

• Participation of High School and Undergraduate Students who are Deaf in Research on American Sign Language Animation

  Matt Huenerfauth (2010) — SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, Issue 97

  This SIGACCESS newsletter article describes the educational-outreach component of a five-year NSF CAREER Award (#0746556) research project at the Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory (LATLab) at Queens College, CUNY. The scientific goal o…

  • American Sign Language
  • ASL animation
  • deaf community
  • STEM education
  • research outreach
  • tiered mentoring
  • signing avatar
  • motion capture
  • assistive technology
  • undergraduate research
  • broadening participation

• Teaching Inclusive Thinking to Undergraduate Students in Computing Programs

  Stephanie Ludi, Matt Huenerfauth, Vicki Hanson, Nidhi Rajendra Palan, Paula Conn (2018) — SIGCSE '18: Proceedings of the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

  This paper investigates whether specific teaching interventions in undergraduate computing courses measurably increase students' accessibility awareness and inclusive thinking. The authors note that, while numerous accessibility teaching approaches h…

  • accessibility education
  • computer science education
  • inclusive design
  • HCI education
  • undergraduate teaching
  • empathy
  • ethics
  • curriculum design
  • attitudes toward disability

• Understanding the Motivations of Final-year Computing Undergraduates for Considering Accessibility

  Paula Conn, Taylor Gotfrid, Qiwen Zhao, Rachel Celestine, Vaishnavi Mande, Kristen Shinohara, Stephanie Ludi, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE), Vol. 20, No. 2, Article 15

  This 22-page ACM Transactions on Computing Education article asks a question that most accessibility education research has side-stepped: what happens to students’ motivation to build accessible technology two years after a required accessibility-edu…

  • accessibility education
  • computing education
  • pedagogy
  • professional development
  • qualitative research
  • accessibility research

• Implementation and Evaluation of Animation Controls Sufficient for Conveying ASL Facial Expressions

  Hernisa Kacorri, Matt Huenerfauth (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14)

  This ASSETS 2014 short paper (2 pages) reports an infrastructure contribution to sign-language-animation research: the authors extended an existing virtual human character (Max, on the open-source EMBR animation platform) with a full set of MPEG-4 Fa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • facial expression
  • animation
  • accessibility research

• Sign Language Interfaces: Discussing the Field's Biggest Challenges

  Danielle Bragg, Meredith Ringel Morris, Christian Vogler, Raja Kushalnagar, Matt Huenerfauth, Hernisa Kacorri (2020) — Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20)

  This CHI 2020 Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting paper (5 pages) is an organising document rather than a conventional research paper. It convenes HCI and accessibility researchers working on sign-language interfaces around the five calls-to-action …

  • sign language
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • deaf culture
  • american sign language
  • research methodology
  • datasets
  • accessibility research
  • participatory design

• Methods for Evaluation of Imperfect Captioning Tools by Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Users at Different Reading Literacy Levels

  Larwan Berke, Sushant Kafle, Matt Huenerfauth (2018) — Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18)

  This CHI 2018 paper (awarded an Honourable Mention) is the originating methodological study behind the group’s later Alonzo et al. work on Automatic Text Simplification evaluation. It asks: when Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) participants evaluate im…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • research methodology
  • literacy
  • accessibility research
  • qualitative research

• Preferred Appearance of Captions Generated by Automatic Speech Recognition for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Viewers

  Larwan Berke, Khaled Albusays, Matthew Seita, Matt Huenerfauth (2019) — Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19)

  This CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work (6 pages) investigates a practical question that has received surprisingly little research: when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is used to caption small-group meetings for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) viewers, h…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • user interface design
  • typography
  • readability
  • videoconferencing accessibility

• Empirical Investigation of Users' Preferred Timing Parameters for American Sign Language Animations

  Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20)

  This CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work (7 pages) investigates a narrow but consequential HCI question: what timing values should be used when generating American Sign Language (ASL) animations from a script, so that Deaf viewers find them comfortable to wa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • web accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • animation

• Automatic Text Simplification Tools for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults: Benefits of Lexical Simplification and Providing Users with Autonomy

  Oliver Alonzo, Matthew Seita, Abraham Glasser, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20)

  This CHI 2020 paper is the first empirical study of lexical Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) adult readers, and introduces user autonomy as a central design variable in accessibility ATS tools. Prior ATS researc…

  • automatic text simplification
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • lexical simplification
  • user autonomy
  • reading accessibility
  • readability
  • user experience
  • qualitative research