Literature Reviews

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

• Adee: Bringing Accessibility Right Inside Design Tools

  Samine Hadadi (2021) — The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2021)

  This extended abstract introduces Adee, an accessibility testing plugin that integrates directly into popular design platforms — Adobe XD, Figma, and Sketch — to make accessibility checking a seamless part of the design workflow rather than an aftert…

  • design tools
  • color contrast
  • color blindness
  • touch target size
  • alternative text
  • automated testing
  • Figma
  • Adobe XD
  • Sketch
  • WCAG

• The Transparency of Automatic Accessibility Evaluation Tools

  Parvaneh Parvin, Vanessa Palumbo, Marco Manca, Fabio Paternò (2021) — Proceedings of the 18th International Web for All Conference (W4A '21)

  This paper examines a critical but often overlooked problem in automated accessibility testing: the lack of transparency in how evaluation tools operate and present their results. The authors observe that different accessibility evaluation tools freq…

  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG
  • transparency
  • web accessibility

• Creating an Open Source, Customizable Accessibility Checker for Content Authors

  Adam Chaboryk (2022) — Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This extended abstract introduces Sa11y, an open-source, in-page accessibility checker specifically designed for content authors rather than developers. Created at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) to manage accessibility acros…

  • automated testing
  • accessibility tools
  • content management
  • open source
  • quality assurance
  • web accessibility

• On the Identification of Accessibility Bug Reports in Open Source Systems

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Stephanie Ludi, Ali Ouni, Ilyes Jenhani (2022) — Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses a significant gap in software engineering research: the automated identification of accessibility-related bug reports in open-source projects. While bug tracking systems like Bugzilla and Monorail accumulate vast numbers of repor…

  • accessibility bug reports
  • machine learning
  • open source
  • bug classification
  • automated testing
  • text classification
  • software quality

• Optimising the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2022) — Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper critically examines the Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM), the W3C's standard five-step process for evaluating website conformance to WCAG. The authors identify several methodological weaknesses in WCAG-EM …

  • accessibility evaluation
  • WCAG-EM
  • sampling methodology
  • automated testing
  • web crawling
  • conformance evaluation
  • accessibility audit
  • statistical methods

• Towards Real-Time Measurements of Internet Health: Optimizing Large-Scale Web Accessibility Evaluations

  Luís P. Carvalho, Tiago Guerreiro, Shaun Lawson, Kyle Montague (2023) — Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023)

  This paper investigates how to optimize page sampling strategies for large-scale web accessibility evaluations, aiming to make near real-time measurements of Internet Health feasible. Current large-scale accessibility studies are financially and time…

  • web accessibility
  • large-scale evaluation
  • automated testing
  • internet health
  • WCAG
  • axe-core
  • page sampling

• Notably Inaccessible — Data Driven Understanding of Data Science Notebook (In)Accessibility

  Venkatesh Potluri, Sudheesh Singanamalla, Nussara Tieanklin, Jennifer Mankoff (2023) — Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23)

  This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of the accessibility of computational notebooks — interactive documents combining code, text, and data visualizations that have become the standard tool for data science work. The researchers analyze…

  • computational notebooks
  • data science
  • screen readers
  • blind and visually impaired
  • data visualization
  • alternative text
  • automated testing
  • web accessibility

• A platform to check website compliance with web accessibility standards

  Reinaldo Ferraz, Ana Duarte, João Bárbara, Adriano C.M. Pereira, Wagner Meira (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This short paper presents the TIC Web Acessibilidade platform, a comprehensive system for evaluating and monitoring the accessibility of Brazilian government websites at scale. Developed by NIC.br (the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee's executiv…

  • automated testing
  • web accessibility
  • government accessibility
  • accessibility monitoring
  • web crawler
  • compliance
  • Global South accessibility

• QualState: Finding Website States for Accessibility Evaluation

  Filipe Rosa Martins, Letícia Seixas Pereira, Carlos Duarte (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper introduces QualState, a web crawling tool designed to solve a fundamental limitation of automated accessibility evaluation: the inability to test dynamic content in Single Page Applications (SPAs). SPAs like Facebook, Google Maps, and Gmai…

  • automated testing
  • web accessibility
  • single page applications
  • web crawling
  • accessibility evaluation
  • dynamic content
  • DOM

• A11yPDF: Bridging the Gap to Inclusive PDFs

  Wajdi Aljedaani, Sandeep Kumar Rudhravaram, Akhila Chintham, Abdulrahman Habib, Marcelo M. Eler (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This technical note introduces A11yPDF, a free web-based tool for evaluating the accessibility of PDF documents against WCAG 2.2 guidelines. The tool addresses key limitations of existing PDF accessibility checkers such as PDFA Inspector, PAVE, ABBYY…

  • PDF accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • document accessibility
  • WCAG
  • tools