Literature Reviews

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

• User Interface of a Nonvisual Table Navigation Method

  Chieko Asakawa, Takashi Itoh (1999) — CHI '99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This two-page CHI '99 late-breaking-results extended abstract addresses a problem that was central to the early accessible web: HTML tables were everywhere — used both for tabular data and, at the time, as a layout device — but talking web browsers r…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • table accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • assistive technology
  • text-to-speech

• Analysis of Navigability of Web Applications for Improving Blind Usability

  Hironobu Takagi, Shin Saito, Kentarou Fukuda, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Vol. 14, No. 3, Article 13

  This TOCHI article is a two-study investigation into why modern web applications — especially visually dense online shopping sites — remain slow and frustrating for blind users even when they pass automated accessibility checks. The authors argue tha…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • navigation
  • usability testing
  • blindness and low vision
  • accessibility evaluation
  • assistive technology
  • accessibility research

• Accessible Photo Album: Enhancing the Photo Sharing Experience for People with Visual Impairment

  Susumu Harada, Daisuke Sato, Dustin W. Adams, Sri Kurniawan, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2013) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '13)

  This paper investigates how blind and partially sighted people can be supported not only in capturing photographs but in organising, recalling, and sharing them afterwards — a step that the authors argue has been largely neglected in prior blind-phot…

  • blindness and low vision
  • mobile accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • photography
  • audiophotography
  • screen readers
  • non-visual interaction
  • eyes-free interaction
  • social accessibility
  • multimedia accessibility

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Repository for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2009) — ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Summer 2009

  This short SIGWEB Newsletter article proposes Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared federated repository for externally authored web-accessibility metadata. The authors argue that accessibility cannot scale as long as fixes depend on the original site…

  • web accessibility
  • metadata
  • semantic transcoding
  • social accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • assistive technology
  • blindness and low vision

• Sasayaki: Augmented Voice Web Browsing Experience

  Daisuke Sato, Shaojian Zhu, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2011) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)

  This paper introduces Sasayaki (Japanese for 'whisper'), a prototype that augments the standard screen-reader voice with a second, physically separated synthesised voice that whispers contextually relevant hints — for example 'entering main content',…

  • screen readers
  • auditory interface
  • voice browser
  • web accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • assistive technology
  • multimodal
  • speech technology

• Developing usable CAPTCHAs for blind users

  Jonathan Holman, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, John D'Arcy (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from a Towson University team led by Jonathan Lazar — joined by Jonathan Holman, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and John D'Arcy of Notre Dame — addresses the long-standing accessibility problem that text-based CAPTCHAs (the distort…

  • CAPTCHA
  • audio CAPTCHA
  • blindness and low vision
  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • security
  • usability
  • universal usability
  • Turing test
  • visual impairment
  • multimodal
  • JAWS
  • Window-Eyes

• Information overload in non-visual web transaction: context analysis spells relief

  Jalal Mahmud (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster paper from Jalal Mahmud at Stony Brook University describes ongoing PhD research into reducing the information overload that blind users experience when completing multi-step web transactions — shopping, registrations, b…

  • screen readers
  • non-visual web access
  • web page segmentation
  • context analysis
  • web transactions
  • information overload
  • blindness and low vision
  • VoiceXML
  • machine learning
  • support vector machine
  • web accessibility
  • JAWS
  • IBM Home Page Reader

• SADIe: exposing implicit information to improve accessibility

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

  Darren Lunn's Assets '07 demonstration paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a transcoding system from the University of Manchester that uses Semantic Web ontologies to expose the implicit visual str…

  • web accessibility
  • transcoding
  • semantic web
  • ontology
  • CSS
  • screen readers
  • visual impairment
  • accessibility evaluation
  • randomisation test
  • single-subject design

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney…

  • multimedia
  • streaming media
  • flash
  • DHTML
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • metadata
  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • audio interference
  • keyboard navigation

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on M…

  • flash
  • transcoding
  • automatic repair
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • web accessibility
  • MSAA