Literature Reviews

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

• Eye Gaze Behaviour and Comprehension of Colour Commentary and Gameplay Captions of Live Fast-Paced Sports for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Television Viewers

  Somang Nam, Tatyana Kumarasamy, Maria Karam, Margot Whitfield, Evan Hibbard, Jenny Leung, Deborah Fels (2026) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This ACM TACCESS study evaluates a novel captioning approach for live fast-paced sports broadcasting: 'Reduced Captioning' that displays only the colour commentary (opinions, context, analysis) and omits the verbatim play-by-play narration. The autho…

  • closed captioning
  • live captioning
  • broadcasting
  • sports
  • eye tracking
  • Deaf
  • Hard of Hearing
  • readability
  • cognitive accessibility
  • user study

• “I’ve Become More Myself”: Challenges and Benefits of Engaging with ADHD Short-Form Video Content and Communities

  Nathalie Alexandra Tcherdakoff, Anna L. Cox, Jon Bird, Paul Marshall (2026) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This qualitative interview study explores how 32 adult ADHDers relate to ADHD-focused Short-Form Video Content (SFVC) on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The lead author — herself an ADHDer and SFVC user — uses reflexive thematic analysis…

  • ADHD
  • neurodivergence
  • neurodiversity
  • social media
  • online communities
  • qualitative research
  • cognitive accessibility
  • disability studies
  • stigma
  • mental health
  • HCI

• Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad, Matt Huenerfauth (2009) — Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009)

  Feng, Elhadad, and Huenerfauth (2009) develop and evaluate an automatic readability-assessment tool targeted specifically at adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) — people in the 'mild' category (IQ 55-70), who comprise roughly 3% of the U.S. po…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • mild intellectual disability
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • working memory
  • discourse features
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • reading level
  • reading comprehension
  • user study
  • natural language processing
  • named entity recognition
  • computational linguistics
  • text-to-speech
  • literacy
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • cognitively motivated features

• A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Martin Jansche, Matt Huenerfauth, Noémie Elhadad (2010) — Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '10), Posters

  Feng et al. (2010) is a computational-linguistics paper that compares a wide variety of text features for automatically predicting the grade level of reading material aimed at primary-school students. The motivation is both intrinsic — traditional re…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • natural language processing
  • machine learning
  • language models
  • computational linguistics
  • POS features
  • discourse features
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • entity grid
  • coreference
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • grade level prediction
  • reading level
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • support vector machines
  • classification

• WADER: a novel wayfinding system with deviation recovery for individuals with cognitive impairments

  Shih-Kai Tsai (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster paper from Shih-Kai Tsai at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan presents WADER (Wayfinding system with DEviation Recovery), a prototype indoor wayfinding system aimed at individuals with cognitive impairments — exp…

  • wayfinding
  • indoor navigation
  • QR code
  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive disabilities
  • traumatic brain injury
  • cerebral palsy
  • intellectual disability
  • schizophrenia
  • Alzheimer's disease
  • PDA
  • mobile accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • independent living
  • employment

• Improving the outcomes of students with cognitive and learning disabilities: phase I development for a web accessibility tool

  Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by Web…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive disabilities
  • learning disabilities
  • cognitive load
  • evaluation tools
  • WAVE
  • WebAIM
  • web accessibility
  • students
  • education
  • automated testing

• Understanding mobile phone requirements for young adults with cognitive disabilities

  Melissa Dawe (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Melissa Dawe's Assets '07 paper is a small, qualitative, ethnographically-informed study of how five Colorado families use mobile phones to support remote communication between parents and their young-adult children (ages 19-25) with cognitive disabi…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • mobile accessibility
  • ethnography
  • semi-structured interviews
  • caregivers
  • independent living
  • assistive technology
  • young adults
  • design requirements
  • grounded theory

• Helping Aphasic People Process Online Information

  Siobhan Devlin, Gary Unthank (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This short paper from the University of Sunderland describes the HAPPI (Helping Aphasic People Process Information) project, a web-based text simplification system designed to help people with aphasia access online content such as news stories. Aphas…

  • aphasia
  • text simplification
  • cognitive accessibility
  • lexical simplification
  • natural language processing
  • stroke
  • reading comprehension
  • alexia

• WISE: A Wizard Interface Supporting Enhanced Usability

  Joshua M. Hailpern (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This poster paper from Carnegie Mellon University presents WISE (Wizard Interface Supporting Enhanced usability), an alternative operating system and application UI specifically designed to address the cognitive deficits of older adults (60+) rather …

  • older adults
  • cognitive accessibility
  • age-friendly design
  • linear interaction
  • cognitive decline
  • user interface design
  • gerontology

• "Beyond Perceivability": Critical Requirements for Universal Design of Information

  Takashi Kato, Masahiro Hori (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper argues that accessibility discussions focus too narrowly on perceivability — making information visually, audibly, or tactilely available — while neglecting the equally critical requirement of cognitive understandability. The authors conte…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive usability
  • universal design
  • cognitive walkthrough
  • evaluation methods
  • web accessibility
  • perceivability
  • understandability