Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
276 results found tagged blindness.
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ApplianceReader: A Wearable, Crowdsourced, Vision-based System to Make Appliances Accessible
This work-in-progress paper presents ApplianceReader, a wearable system that combines a point-of-view camera (Google Glass) with crowdsourcing and computer vision to make everyday appliance control panels accessible to people with visual impairments.…
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"It's almost like they're trying to hide it": How User-Provided Image Descriptions Have Failed to Make Twitter Accessible
This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of how Twitter's opt-in image description feature (launched in 2016) has affected the accessibility of images on the platform. The researchers analyzed 1.09 million tweets with images collecte…
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Tracking @stemxcomet: Teaching Programming to Blind Students via 3D Printing, Crisis Management, and Twitter
This paper describes the design and execution of a four-day programming workshop for blind and visually impaired high school students, conducted as part of the National Federation of the Blind's STEM-X summer science camp. Nine students (grades 8-12)…
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People with Visual Impairment Training Personal Object Recognizers: Feasibility and Challenges
This paper explores whether people with visual impairments can train their own personalized object recognition systems using a smartphone camera and a small number of example photos. The authors address a fundamental limitation of existing object rec…
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Twitter A11y: A Browser Extension to Make Twitter Images Accessible
This paper presents Twitter A11y, a browser extension designed to address the widespread lack of alternative text on images posted to Twitter. The authors note that while around 12% of Twitter content consists of images, only 0.1% of those images inc…
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StateLens: A Reverse Engineering Solution for Making Existing Dynamic Touchscreens Accessible
This paper presents StateLens, a three-part system that makes existing dynamic touchscreen interfaces accessible to blind users without requiring any modification to the touchscreen hardware or software. Blind people routinely encounter inaccessible …
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From Screen Reading to Aural Glancing: Towards Instant Access to Key Page Sections
This paper addresses a fundamental problem in screen reader navigation: while sighted users can glance at a web page to instantly understand its structure and locate relevant sections, screen reader users are forced to listen to content serially, mak…
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BraillePlay: Educational Smartphone Games for Blind Children
This paper presents BraillePlay, a suite of four educational smartphone games designed to teach Braille character encodings to blind children aged 5 and older. The games are built on VBraille, a method for displaying Braille characters on a touchscre…
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New Tools for Automating Tactile Geographic Map Translation
This demo paper presents a Matlab-based software tool that semi-automates the conversion of visual geographic maps into tactile versions suitable for blind students. Tactile graphics are the most effective modality for blind people to comprehend grap…
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A Google Glass App to Help the Blind in Small Talk
This demo paper presents a Google Glass prototype that helps blind individuals initiate small talk by automatically analysing a scene to detect the number of people present, their approximate ages, and gender distribution, then synthesising this info…