Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
74 results found tagged blindness and low vision.
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Design and Development of an Indoor Navigation and Object Identification System for the Blind
This paper presents a multi-sensor orientation assistant for blind users navigating unknown indoor environments. The system addresses three core problems identified by blind users: determining one's position, determining head direction and movement d…
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Evaluation of a Non-Visual Molecule Browser
This paper evaluates Kekulé, software designed to allow visually impaired users to explore chemical molecular structures — diagrams that are typically presented as two-dimensional graph schematics showing atoms (nodes) connected by bonds (edges). Mol…
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Accessibility Designer: Visualizing Usability for the Blind
This paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory presents Accessibility Designer (aDesigner), a tool that goes beyond conventional accessibility checkers by visualising the usability of web pages for blind screen reader users rather than merely checki…
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The Audio Abacus: Representing Numerical Values with Nonspeech Sound for the Visually Impaired
This paper introduces the Audio Abacus, a novel sonification application that transforms exact numerical values into sequences of non-speech tones, following the analogy of a physical abacus where each digit is represented by a distinct sound. Unlike…
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Multimodal Virtual Reality Versus Printed Medium in Visualization for Blind People
This paper presents a comparative evaluation of two approaches for making bar chart data accessible to blind and visually impaired people: traditional raised tactile diagrams and a multimodal virtual reality system. The VR system combines a SensAble …
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Design and Implementation of Virtual Environments for Training of the Visually Impaired
This paper from the Informatics and Telematics Institute in Greece presents the ENORASI project, an EU-funded initiative to develop a haptic virtual reality training system for blind and visually impaired people. The system uses a CyberGrasp haptic g…
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Site-Wide Annotation: Reconstructing Existing Pages to Be Accessible
This paper from IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory presents a system for making inaccessible web pages accessible through external annotations, without modifying the original pages. The core problem is "page fragmentation" — on visually designed web pages…
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A Study of Blind Drawing Practice: Creating Graphical Information Without the Visual Channel
This paper from UC Berkeley investigates how blind users create drawings and proposes a grid-based model for non-visual drawing tools. The researchers began by observing that existing drawing tools for blind users fail because they lack adequate cont…
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Annotation-Based Transcoding for Nonvisual Web Access
This companion paper to the same authors' transcoding proxy paper (also at Assets '00) provides a detailed technical description of the annotation-based component of their IBM Japan transcoding system. The core problem addressed is that modern web pa…
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Wearable Interfaces for Orientation and Wayfinding
This paper from the Atlanta VA Rehabilitation R&D Center presents the development and evaluation of three wearable orientation interfaces designed to help people with severe visual impairment maintain spatial orientation while navigating, with street…