Literature Reviews

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

• Variability in Reactions to Instructional Guidance during Smartphone-Based Assisted Navigation of Blind Users

  Eshed Ohn-Bar, João Guerreiro, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2018) — Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT)

  This paper takes a close, sensor-level look at something most indoor-navigation research glosses over: how differently individual blind users actually react to the same spoken instruction. The authors instrumented a smartphone-and-BLE-beacon turn-by-…

  • indoor navigation
  • turn-by-turn navigation
  • blindness
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • orientation and mobility
  • personalization
  • adaptive interface
  • motion analysis
  • reaction time
  • mobile accessibility
  • wayfinding
  • user variability
  • cane technique
  • Bluetooth Low Energy

• Airport Accessibility and Navigation Assistance for People with Visual Impairments

  João Guerreiro, Dragan Ahmetovic, Daisuke Sato, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2019) — Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This paper investigates whether a BLE-beacon-based smartphone navigation system can enable visually impaired travelers to move through an airport independently — a setting where they are currently required to rely on airline-provided sighted escorts …

  • airport accessibility
  • blind navigation
  • indoor navigation
  • orientation and mobility
  • visual impairment
  • blindness
  • assistive technology
  • Bluetooth Low Energy
  • beacons
  • wayfinding
  • mobile accessibility
  • independent travel

• ReCog: Supporting Blind People in Recognizing Personal Objects

  Dragan Ahmetovic, Daisuke Sato, Uran Oh, Tatsuya Ishihara, Kris Kitani, Chieko Asakawa (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  ReCog is a smartphone application designed to help blind users recognize their own personal objects — items like specific clothing, handmade goods, medicines, or family photos that cannot be identified by general-purpose recognizers such as Seeing AI…

  • visual impairment
  • blindness
  • object recognition
  • computer vision
  • deep learning
  • sonification
  • camera-aiming guidance
  • mobile accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • personal object recognizer
  • transfer learning
  • augmented reality
  • photography

• ChitChatGuide: Conversational Interaction Using Large Language Models for Assisting People with Visual Impairments to Explore a Shopping Mall

  Yuka Kaniwa, Masaki Kuribayashi, Seita Kayukawa, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Shigeo Morishima (2024) — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI)

  ChitChatGuide is a smartphone-based indoor navigation system that wraps a GPT-4-powered conversational interface around an existing BLE-beacon localisation stack (HULOP) to support something most blind-navigation research overlooks: casual, purpose-l…

  • blindness and low vision
  • large language model
  • indoor navigation
  • wayfinding
  • conversational agent
  • orientation and mobility
  • accessible AI
  • mobile accessibility
  • exploration

• Snap&Nav: Smartphone-based Indoor Navigation System For Blind People via Floor Map Analysis and Intersection Detection

  Masaya Kubota, Masaki Kuribayashi, Seita Kayukawa, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Shigeo Morishima (2024) — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (MobileHCI)

  Snap&Nav is a smartphone-based indoor navigation system for blind travellers that works in any building with a visible floor map, without requiring the building owner to pre-build a digital map, install BLE beacons, or deploy any other localisation i…

  • blindness and low vision
  • indoor navigation
  • wayfinding
  • map-less navigation
  • intersection detection
  • orientation and mobility
  • sighted assistance
  • mobile accessibility
  • computer vision

• Barrier pointing: using physical edges to assist target acquisition on mobile device touch screens

  Jon Froehlich, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Shaun K. Kane (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Froehlich, Wobbrock and Kane propose barrier pointing: a set of stylus-based target acquisition techniques that exploit the raised physical edge of a mobile touch screen to stabilise input for users with motor impairments. Standard touch-screen tappi…

  • mobile accessibility
  • touchscreen accessibility
  • motor impairment
  • target acquisition
  • input techniques
  • assistive technology
  • Fitts' Law
  • passive haptic feedback
  • accessible interaction
  • user study

• Variable frame rate for low power mobile sign language communication

  Neva Cherniavsky, Anna C. Cavender, Richard E. Ladner, Eve A. Riskin (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This paper from the University of Washington MobileASL team — Neva Cherniavsky, Anna Cavender, Richard Ladner, and Eve Riskin — addresses a then-emerging problem: enabling Deaf people in the United States to hold real-time American Sign Language conv…

  • American Sign Language
  • sign language
  • fingerspelling
  • Deaf community
  • video phone
  • mobile accessibility
  • MobileASL
  • video compression
  • frame rate
  • turn-taking
  • support vector machine
  • computer vision
  • low power
  • multimedia accessibility
  • deaf and hard of hearing

• 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

• Semantic & syntactic context-aware text entry methods

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

  Jun Gong's Assets '07 demonstration paper proposes a context-aware extension to the dictionary-based predictive disambiguation (DBPD) text-entry methods — the family that included the once-ubiquitous T9 on mobile phone keypads. DBPD methods let users…

  • text entry
  • motor impairment
  • visual impairment
  • predictive text
  • T9
  • natural language processing
  • disambiguation
  • mobile accessibility
  • alternative and augmentative communication
  • part-of-speech tagging

• Using participatory activities with seniors to critique, build, and evaluate mobile phones

  Michael Massimi, Ronald M. Baecker, Michael Wu (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This Assets '07 paper from University of Toronto engages older adults not as subjects of a usability study but as co-designers of a mobile phone system. Massimi, Baecker, and Wu argue that the two dominant trends in 'senior-friendly' phone design — o…

  • mobile accessibility
  • older adults
  • aging
  • participatory design
  • co-design
  • paper prototyping
  • usability
  • design guidelines
  • scenario-based design
  • PICTIVE