Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
276 results found tagged blindness.
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Tapulator: A Non-Visual Calculator Using Natural Prefix-Free Codes
This demonstration paper presents the Tapulator, a non-visual calculator for smartphones that replaces traditional on-screen buttons with a simple gesture-based numeric entry system using multi-finger taps and swipes. The core innovation is a natural…
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Exploration and Avoidance of Surrounding Obstacles for the Visually Impaired
This paper presents the 3DOD (3D Obstacle Detector), a wearable system that combines a 3D Time-of-Flight (TOF) camera with a portable multi-line refreshable Braille display to help blind pedestrians detect and avoid obstacles beyond the reach of a wh…
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Bypassing Lists: Accelerating Screen-Reader Fact-Finding with Guided Tours
This paper investigates whether guided tours — a navigation pattern that linearly links content pages with next/previous controls — can help screen-reader users perform fact-finding tasks more efficiently than traditional index-based navigation, part…
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"Pray Before You Step Out": Describing Personal and Situational Blind Navigation Behaviors
This paper presents a formative study exploring how 30 adults with vision impairments use technology and personal strategies to navigate both indoor and outdoor environments. Rather than introducing new navigation technology, the research aims to bui…
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Interviewing Blind Photographers: Design Insights for a Smartphone Application
This short paper reports on interviews with 11 people with limited to no vision who take digital photographs independently, investigating how they take, store, organize, and share their photos. While prior research had addressed camera aiming assista…
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Exploring the Use of Speech Input by Blind People on Mobile Devices
This paper investigates how blind people use speech input on mobile devices through two studies: a survey of 169 participants (64 blind/low-vision, 105 sighted) and a laboratory study with 8 blind participants composing paragraphs on an iPod Touch us…
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Uncovering Information Needs for Independent Spatial Learning for Users Who Are Visually Impaired
This paper presents two studies examining how visually impaired individuals learn about their environments and build cognitive maps — the mental representations of spatial relationships that sighted people largely construct through casual visual obse…
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Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View
This paper introduces Bus Stop CSI (Crowdsourcing Streetview Inspections), a scalable method for collecting bus stop location and landmark descriptions by combining online crowdsourcing with Google Street View (GSV). Blind and low-vision bus riders r…
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Eyes-Free Yoga: An Exergame Using Depth Cameras for Blind & Low Vision Exercise
This paper presents Eyes-Free Yoga, an exergame built on the Microsoft Kinect that teaches six yoga poses to people who are blind or low vision using entirely auditory feedback. Research shows that people with visual impairments are more likely to be…
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Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering
This paper introduces the concept of social microvolunteering — a hybrid of friendsourcing and microvolunteering where volunteers install an application that posts microtasks to their social media feeds, enabling their friends to contribute to causes…