Literature Reviews

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

• Accessibility Designer: Visualizing Usability for the Blind

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda, Junji Maeda (2003) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '04)

  This paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory presents Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), a tool that goes beyond conventional accessibility checkers by visualising the usability of web pages for blind screen reader users rather than merely checki…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility testing
  • screen reader
  • blindness and low vision
  • accessibility tools
  • usability
  • automated testing
  • skip navigation
  • alt text
  • heading hierarchy
  • accessibility evaluation

• Evaluating Web Resources for Disability Access

  Murray Rowan, Peter Gregor, David Sloan, Paul Booth (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from the University of Dundee's Digital Media Access Group argues that existing accessibility evaluation methods in 2000 were individually insufficient and proposes a comprehensive meta-methodology that combines multiple evaluation techniq…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility audit
  • automated testing
  • manual testing
  • heuristic evaluation
  • WCAG
  • web accessibility
  • evaluation methodology
  • usability testing
  • assistive technology testing

• A comparative test of web accessibility evaluation methods

  Giorgio Brajnik (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a controlled laboratory experiment comparing two web accessibility evaluation methods: conformance review (CR) and barrier walkthrough (BW). Conformance review is the traditional approach where evaluators check whether a page sati…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • conformance testing
  • barrier walkthrough
  • web accessibility
  • WCAG
  • evaluation methods
  • accessibility testing
  • quality assessment

• How Much Does Expertise Matter? A Barrier Walkthrough Study with Experts and Non-Experts

  Yeliz Yesilada, Giorgio Brajnik, Simon Harper (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper investigates whether expertise matters in manual web accessibility evaluation by comparing results from 19 expert and 51 non-expert judges using the Barrier Walkthrough (BW) method. The BW method is an analytical technique based on heurist…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • barrier walkthrough
  • WCAG
  • evaluator effect
  • expertise
  • accessibility testing
  • research methodology

• Validity and Reliability of Web Accessibility Guidelines

  Giorgio Brajnik (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper presents an experiment measuring the validity and reliability of WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0 checkpoints when applied by human evaluators. The study recruited 35 young web developers with some accessibility knowledge from a university course and…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG
  • conformance testing
  • inter-rater reliability
  • web accessibility
  • guidelines

• The Interplay Between Web Aesthetics and Accessibility

  Grace Mbipom, Simon Harper (2011) — Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2011)

  This paper investigates whether the commonly held belief that visually attractive websites are inherently inaccessible holds true. The research was conducted in two studies. In Study 1, 30 sighted web users rated 50 homepages (drawn from Alexa top UK…

  • web accessibility
  • visual design
  • user experience
  • accessibility evaluation
  • heuristic evaluation
  • visual impairment

• Monitoring Accessibility: Large Scale Evaluations at a Geo Political Level

  Silvia Mirri, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Paola Salomoni (2011) — The Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper presents AMA (Accessibility Monitoring Application), a system designed to monitor web accessibility across large collections of URLs from a geo-political perspective. Developed as part of the VaMoLà project — a collaboration between the Em…

  • web accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • policy
  • compliance
  • governance
  • metrics
  • data visualization

• Accessibility by Demonstration: Enabling End Users to Guide Developers to Web Accessibility Solutions

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jeremy T. Brudvik, Bernie Zhang (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper introduces Accessibility by Demonstration (ABD), a novel approach to accessibility evaluation that lets assistive technology users record the accessibility problems they encounter as shareable, replayable demonstrations and send them direc…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility testing
  • screen readers
  • blind and low vision
  • accessibility evaluation
  • developer tools
  • user research

• Web Accessibility Evaluation with the Crowd: Using Glance to Rapidly Code User Testing Video

  Mitchell Gordon (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper proposes using Glance, a crowd-powered video coding tool, to accelerate the analysis of user accessibility testing videos. User testing with people with disabilities is a recommended component of web accessibility evaluation (as outlined i…

  • crowdsourcing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • usability testing
  • video coding
  • web accessibility
  • WCAG
  • user testing

• Evaluating the Accessibility of Crowdsourcing Tasks on Amazon's Mechanical Turk

  Rocío Calvo, Shaun K. Kane, Amy Hurst (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper presents a heuristic accessibility evaluation of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a crowdsourcing platform where workers complete short tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks, or HITs) for small payments. The authors argue that crowd work platform…

  • crowdsourcing
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • employment
  • WCAG
  • heuristic evaluation
  • disability employment