Literature Reviews

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

• Site-Wide Annotation: Reconstructing Existing Pages to Be Accessible

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Kentarou Fukuda, Junji Maeda (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '02)

  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…

  • web accessibility
  • web transcoding
  • web annotation
  • screen reader
  • blindness and low vision
  • DOM
  • XPath
  • content adaptation

• A Semantic Transcoding System to Adapt Web Services for Users with Disabilities

  Anita W. Huang, Neel Sundaresan (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from IBM Almaden Research Center presents Aurora, a semantic transcoding system that adapts web-based services for users with disabilities by extracting the meaning of web content rather than simply reformatting its syntax. The key problem…

  • web accessibility
  • web transcoding
  • content adaptation
  • XML
  • semantic web
  • assistive technology
  • web navigation
  • adaptive interface

• Fast Web by Using Updated Content Extraction and a Bookmark Facility

  Tsuyoshi Ebina, Seiji Igi, Teruhisa Miyake (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from Japan's Communications Research Laboratory presents two techniques for improving speech-based web navigation for visually impaired users. The core problem is that accessing web pages through speech output is significantly slower than …

  • web accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • web navigation
  • screen reader
  • speech-based navigation
  • content extraction
  • assistive technology

• Annotation-Based Transcoding for Nonvisual Web Access

  Chieko Asakawa, Hironobu Takagi (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  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…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • transcoding
  • non-visual access
  • blindness and low vision
  • annotations
  • content adaptation
  • web navigation
  • crowdsourcing
  • authoring tools

• A Comparison of Voice Controlled and Mouse Controlled Web Browsing

  Kevin Christian, Bill Kules, Ben Shneiderman, Adel Youssef (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This within-subjects study from the University of Maryland compared voice-controlled web browsing with traditional mouse-based browsing using 18 participants. The researchers used Conversa, a commercial voice browser from Conversational Computing tha…

  • voice browser
  • speech recognition
  • web navigation
  • voice control
  • hypertext
  • user research
  • usability testing
  • web accessibility
  • input methods

• Transcoding Proxy for Nonvisual Web Access

  Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper presents a transcoding proxy system developed at IBM Japan that transforms existing web pages to be more accessible for blind users. The authors address the growing problem of web pages being designed with increasingly complex layouts that…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • transcoding
  • proxy
  • blind and low vision
  • non-visual access
  • annotations
  • content adaptation
  • web navigation

• Evaluating Web Resources for Disability Access

  Murray Rowan, Peter Gregor, David Sloan, Paul Booth (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from the University of Dundee's Digital Media Access Group argues that existing accessibility evaluation methods in 2000 were individually insufficient and proposes a comprehensive meta-methodology that combines multiple evaluation techniq…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility audit
  • automated testing
  • manual testing
  • heuristic evaluation
  • WCAG
  • web accessibility
  • evaluation methodology
  • usability testing
  • assistive technology testing

• A Domain Specific Language Framework for Non-Visual Browsing of Complex HTML Structures

  E. Pontelli, W. Xiong, G. Gupta, A. I. Karshmer (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from New Mexico State University, University of Texas at Dallas, and University of South Florida presents a framework for navigating complex HTML structures — specifically tables, frames, and forms — that are particularly challenging for s…

  • table accessibility
  • non-visual browsing
  • screen readers
  • domain specific language
  • HTML tables
  • semantic structure
  • web accessibility
  • blind users
  • conceptual graphs

• A Web Navigation Tool for the Blind

  Mary Zajicek, Chris Powell, Chris Reeves (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This short paper from Oxford Brookes University and the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) presents BrookesTalk, a prototype speech-output web browser designed to help blind users make rapid decisions about whether a web page is useful to …

  • web accessibility
  • blindness
  • information retrieval
  • screen readers
  • text summarization
  • nonvisual web access
  • web browsers

• User Interface of a Home Page Reader

  Chieko Asakawa, Takashi Itoh (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper from IBM Japan's Tokyo Research Laboratory describes the design and evaluation of Home Page Reader, one of the earliest dedicated web browsers for blind users, which became an IBM Japan product in October 1997. The paper opens by framing t…

  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • blindness
  • text-to-speech
  • nonvisual web access
  • user interface design
  • assistive technology