Literature Reviews

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

• Spindex (Speech Index) Improves Auditory Menu Acceptance and Navigation Performance

  Myounghoon Jeon, Bruce N. Walker (2011) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper introduces the "spindex" (speech index), a novel auditory cue designed to improve navigation through spoken menus on mobile devices. The spindex works by pronouncing the first letter of each menu item before the full text-to-speech (TTS) r…

  • auditory interfaces
  • mobile accessibility
  • text-to-speech
  • screen readers
  • user interface design
  • blindness
  • sonification

• Expanding a Large Inclusive Study of Human Listening Rates

  Danielle Bragg, Katharina Reinecke, Richard E. Ladner (2021) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This study presents the first large-scale, inclusive online investigation of human listening rates for fast synthetic speech, conducted via the LabintheWild crowdsourcing platform over 12 months with 1,409 participants. The research aimed to understa…

  • screen readers
  • synthetic speech
  • text-to-speech
  • listening rates
  • auditory processing
  • visual impairment
  • crowdsourced research
  • VoiceOver
  • LabintheWild

• Machine Generation of Audio Description for Blind and Visually Impaired People

  Virgínia P. Campos, Tiago M. U. de Araújo, Guido L. de Souza Filho, Luiz M. G. Gonçalves (2023) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents an extension to CineAD, a system for automatically generating audio descriptions (AD) for videos. The authors address a critical accessibility gap: most videos, films, and cultural programming lack audio descriptions, leaving blin…

  • audio description
  • blind and visually impaired
  • computer vision
  • machine learning
  • video accessibility
  • text-to-speech
  • object detection
  • automation

• Faster Text-to-Speeches: Enhancing Blind People's Information Scanning with Faster Concurrent Speech

  João Guerreiro, Daniel Gonçalves (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This paper investigates how blind users can scan digital information more efficiently by comparing two approaches: increasing speech rate (the traditional method) versus using concurrent speech (multiple simultaneous voices). The research leverages t…

  • blindness
  • screen readers
  • text-to-speech
  • speech rate
  • concurrent speech
  • auditory perception
  • cocktail party effect
  • information scanning

• ChatWoz: Chatting through a Wizard of Oz

  Pedro Fialho, Luísa Coheur (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  ChatWoz is a Wizard of Oz system designed to enable autistic children to interact with caregivers through a virtual avatar. The system was motivated by widely reported cases of autistic children enthusiastically engaging with commercial virtual assis…

  • autism
  • Wizard of Oz
  • virtual agent
  • dialogue systems
  • child-caregiver interaction
  • text-to-speech
  • emotion
  • avatar
  • AAC

• READ: A (Research) Platform for Evaluating Non-visual Access Methods to Digital Documents

  Laurent Sorin, Julie Lemarié, Mustapha Mojahid (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  READ (Documents Architecture REstitution) is a configurable research platform for evaluating alternative methods of non-visual access to digital documents. The system addresses a well-documented problem: despite extensive functionality, screen reader…

  • document accessibility
  • research platform
  • non-visual access
  • screen readers
  • text-to-speech
  • multimodal
  • auditory interface
  • spatialized audio
  • research tools

• Prime III: Voting for a More Accessible Future

  Simone A. Smarr, Imani N. Sherman, Brianna Posadas, Juan E. Gilbert (2017) — Proceedings of the 19th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17)

  This demonstration paper presents Prime III, an open-source, multimodal electronic ballot marking system designed to allow all voters — regardless of ability or disability — to vote independently and privately on the same machine. Developed at the Un…

  • accessible voting
  • universal design
  • multimodal interaction
  • blindness
  • civic participation
  • text-to-speech
  • switch access
  • voice input
  • open source

• Assistive Debugging to Support Accessible LaTeX Based Document Authoring

  Ahtsham Manzoor, Murayyiam Parvez, Suleman Shahid, Asim Karim (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This demonstration paper presents ALAP (Accessible LaTeX-based Authoring and Presentation), an open-source extension to the TeXlipse Eclipse plugin that makes LaTeX document authoring more accessible for blind researchers and writers. LaTeX is widely…

  • mathematical accessibility
  • LaTeX
  • blind and low vision
  • text-to-speech
  • document authoring
  • STEM accessibility
  • debugging
  • screen readers
  • programming accessibility

• Interactive audio documents

  T. V. Raman, David Gries (1994) — Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '94)

  This paper describes the browsing component of AsTeR (Audio System for Technical Readings), an interactive computing system developed by T. V. Raman that audio-formats electronic documents written in LaTeX to produce navigable audio documents. The pa…

  • mathematical accessibility
  • audio formatting
  • screen readers
  • document accessibility
  • blind and low vision
  • text-to-speech
  • interactive browsing

• Screen Reader/2: Access to OS/2 and the Graphical User Interface

  Jim Thatcher (1994) — Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '94)

  This paper describes IBM Screen Reader/2, a screen access system that enabled blind users to interact with the OS/2 graphical user interface (GUI), Windows programs running under OS/2, and text-mode DOS and OS/2 programs. The system evolved from near…

  • screen readers
  • graphical user interface
  • blind users
  • off-screen model
  • text-to-speech
  • GUI accessibility
  • IBM