Literature Reviews

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

• In-context Q&A to Support Blind People Using Smartphones

  André Rodrigues, Kyle Montague, Hugo Nicolau, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This paper addresses a pervasive but understudied problem: the daily challenges blind people face when using smartphone applications go far beyond the touchscreen gesture difficulties that most accessibility research focuses on. The researchers condu…

  • blindness
  • smartphone accessibility
  • screen readers
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • mobile accessibility
  • peer support
  • knowledge sharing

• Towards More Robust Speech Interactions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

  Raymond Fok, Harmanpreet Kaur, Skanda Palani, Martez E. Mott, Walter S. Lasecki (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This University of Michigan study addresses a largely overlooked accessibility gap: while much research has focused on providing deaf users access to spoken output (via captioning or sign language), almost no work has addressed improving deaf users' …

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf speech
  • crowdsourcing
  • speech intelligibility
  • voice interface
  • human computation
  • smart speaker

• VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Greg Little, Andrew Miller, Robert C. Miller, Aubrey Tatarowicz, Brandyn White, Samuel White, Tom Yeh (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper introduces VizWiz, a pioneering mobile application that enables blind and low-vision people to get nearly real-time answers to visual questions by connecting their smartphone cameras to remote paid workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Users …

  • blind and low vision
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology
  • mobile accessibility
  • human computation
  • visual question answering
  • independence
  • smartphone

• Legion Scribe: Real-Time Captioning by the Non-Experts

  Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Raja Kushalnagar, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This demo paper introduces Legion Scribe, a system that enables real-time captioning of speech by harnessing 3-5 ordinary typists working simultaneously, rather than relying on expensive professional stenographers. Real-time captioning provides text …

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • crowdsourcing
  • real-time captioning
  • communication accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • human computation

• Introducing Game Elements in Crowdsourced Video Captioning by Non-Experts

  Hernisa Kacorri, Kaoru Shinkawa, Shin Saito (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from CUNY Graduate Center and IBM Research Tokyo presents a gamified crowdsourcing platform for video captioning that combines ASR output with non-expert human transcription to improve caption accuracy without monetary rewards. The system …

  • captioning
  • crowdsourcing
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • gamification
  • automatic speech recognition
  • human computation

• The Effects of Automatic Speech Recognition Quality on Human Transcription Latency

  Yashesh Gaur, Walter S. Lasecki, Florian Metze, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2016) — Proceedings of the 13th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan empirically investigates when automatic speech recognition (ASR) output helps or hinders human transcriptionists producing captions for deaf and hard of hearing people. Manual …

  • speech recognition
  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • automatic speech recognition