Literature Reviews

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

• Multi-Perspective Visual Contrastive Decoding for Reliable Assistance

  Bocheng Pan, Hailong Shi, Xingyu Gao (2026) — ACM Transactions on Internet of Things

  This technical paper presents MPVCD (Multi-Perspective Visual Contrastive Decoding), a framework designed to address the reliability of AI-generated visual descriptions for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). The core problem it tackles: w…

  • blindness and low vision
  • multimodal AI
  • image captioning
  • visual hallucination
  • assistive technology
  • IoT
  • visual description
  • machine learning

• Robots for Older Adults: A Scoping Review

  Samuel A. Olatunji, Yao-Lin Tsai, Saathveek A. Gowrishankar, Megan A. Bayles, Wendy A. Rogers (2026) — ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

  This mixed-method scoping review in the ACM Journal of Human-Robot Interaction establishes the state of the science for robots supporting older adults, covering 205 empirical studies published from 2010 through 2022. The review follows PRISMA reporti…

  • human-robot interaction
  • robots
  • older adults
  • aging
  • assistive technology
  • scoping review
  • ADL
  • IADL
  • EADL
  • social robots
  • telepresence
  • user-centered design

• AXECC: Benchmarking the Privacy and Accessibility Impact of Browser Extensions

  James Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini (2026) — ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

  This paper presents AXECC, a novel automated framework for jointly measuring the web-tracking behaviour and accessibility impact of browser extensions at scale. The authors argue that while browser extensions are widely installed to improve the brows…

  • browser extensions
  • web tracking
  • privacy
  • accessibility testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • WAVE
  • Lighthouse
  • dark mode
  • screen readers
  • assistive technology

• Participation of High School and Undergraduate Students who are Deaf in Research on American Sign Language Animation

  Matt Huenerfauth (2010) — SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, Issue 97

  This SIGACCESS newsletter article describes the educational-outreach component of a five-year NSF CAREER Award (#0746556) research project at the Linguistic and Assistive Technologies Laboratory (LATLab) at Queens College, CUNY. The scientific goal o…

  • American Sign Language
  • ASL animation
  • deaf community
  • STEM education
  • research outreach
  • tiered mentoring
  • signing avatar
  • motion capture
  • assistive technology
  • undergraduate research
  • broadening participation

• 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

• On the Audio Representation of Radial Direction

  Susumu Harada, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2011) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)

  This paper proposes a new primitive for auditory displays — radial direction — and evaluates a concrete mapping of vowel-like sounds to eight cardinal and ordinal directions. The authors observe that almost all prior sonification work has mapped data…

  • sonification
  • auditory display
  • auditory interface
  • non-visual interaction
  • eyes-free interaction
  • navigation
  • blindness and low vision
  • assistive technology
  • human-computer interaction