Literature Reviews

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

• Digital Talking Books on a PC: A Usability Evaluation of the Prototype DAISY Playback Software

  Sarah Morley (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper describes the design and usability evaluation of the first PC-based DAISY (Digital Audio-Based Information System) playback software, developed at the request of the Swedish Braille and Talking Book Library. The DAISY system represented a …

  • DAISY
  • digital talking book
  • usability testing
  • blind and low vision
  • auditory navigation
  • accessible publishing
  • structured audio
  • screen reader

• Improving the Usability of Speech-Based Interfaces for Blind Users

  Ian J. Pitt, Alistair D. N. Edwards (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This paper from the University of York examines the usability problems inherent in speech-based interfaces for blind computer users and presents a study comparing how blind and sighted subjects process information delivered through synthetic speech. …

  • blindness and low vision
  • screen reader
  • speech synthesis
  • usability
  • speech dialogue design
  • text-to-speech
  • auditory interface
  • prosody
  • cognitive load

• Emacspeak — Direct Speech Access

  T. V. Raman (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This paper by T. V. Raman (then at Adobe Systems, developed while at Digital Equipment Corporation's Cambridge Research Lab) presents Emacspeak, a speech output subsystem for Emacs that provides what the author terms "direct speech access" to UNIX wo…

  • screen reader
  • speech output
  • blindness and low vision
  • UNIX accessibility
  • text-to-speech
  • Emacs
  • Linux accessibility
  • open source
  • software accessibility

• Designing Interface Toolkit with Dynamic Selectable Modality

  Shiro Kawai, Hitoshi Aida, Tadao Saito (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This paper presents the Fruit (Flexible and Rearrangeable User Interface Toolkit) system, an architecture for building user interfaces that allow dynamic switching between interaction modalities at runtime. The authors argue that the rigid coupling b…

  • multimodal interaction
  • user interface design
  • assistive technology
  • abstract widgets
  • toolkit design
  • modality switching
  • screen reader
  • braille

• V-Lynx: Bringing the World Wide Web to Sight Impaired Users

  Mitchell Krell, Davor Cubranic (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This 1996 paper from the University of Southern Mississippi presents V-Lynx, one of the earliest voice-enabled web browsers designed to make the World Wide Web accessible to sight-impaired users. At this time, WWW traffic had only recently become sig…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • speech synthesis
  • web browser
  • blind users
  • non-visual browsing
  • HTML
  • hypertext navigation
  • accessibility history

• Automation of Repetitive Web Browsing Tasks with Voice-Enabled Macros

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

  This paper proposes an approach for automating repetitive web browsing tasks through personalized macros with a speech-enabled interface, implemented within the HearSay non-visual web browser at Stony Brook University. The core problem is that non-vi…

  • screen reader
  • web accessibility
  • non-visual browsing
  • web macro
  • voice interface
  • web automation
  • blind users
  • assistive technology

• Social Accessibility: Achieving Accessibility through Collaborative Metadata Authoring

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Takashi Itoh, Chieko Asakawa (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This IBM Research Tokyo paper proposes Social Accessibility, a system that applies social computing principles to web accessibility by enabling a worldwide community of volunteers to collaboratively create external accessibility metadata for inaccess…

  • web accessibility
  • social computing
  • collaborative authoring
  • metadata
  • web transcoding
  • screen reader
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology

• A Tactile Windowing System for Blind Users

  Denise Prescher, Gerhard Weber, Martin Spindler (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper from Technische Universität Dresden presents the Braille Window System (BWS), a windowing interface designed for a large planar tactile display — the BrailleDis9000, a touch-sensitive pin-matrix of 120 columns and 60 rows (7,200 pins). Sta…

  • braille
  • tactile display
  • tactile graphics
  • gesture interaction
  • blindness
  • screen reader
  • windowing system
  • GUI accessibility
  • pin-matrix display
  • multitouch

• Assistive Web Browsing with Touch Interfaces

  Faisal Ahmed, Muhammad Asiful Islam, Yevgen Borodin, I. V. Ramakrishnan (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This demo paper from Stony Brook University proposes a touch-based directional navigation technique to improve web browsing for blind users on touch devices (iPhone, MacBook trackpad). The authors identify two key problems with Apple's VoiceOver touc…

  • web accessibility
  • touch interface
  • screen reader
  • VoiceOver
  • visual impairment
  • navigation
  • blind users

• Sasayaki: An Augmented Voice-Based Web Browsing Experience

  Shaojian Zhu, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper introduces Sasayaki (meaning "whisper" in Japanese), an intelligent voice-based agent designed to augment voice browser navigation for users with visual impairments. The authors, from IBM Research Tokyo and UMBC, identify two key problems …

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • voice browser
  • visual impairment
  • contextual support
  • intelligent agent
  • web navigation