Literature Reviews

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

• Accessibility and Smart Data: the Case Study of mPASS

  Catia Prandi (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This doctoral consortium paper presents mPASS (mobile Pervasive Accessibility Social Sensing), a research project from the University of Bologna that applies the concept of Smart Data to urban accessibility. The paper argues that while crowdsourcing …

  • accessible maps
  • crowdsourcing
  • smart data
  • urban accessibility
  • user modeling
  • mobile accessibility
  • personalization
  • navigation

• SmartWrap: Seeing Datasets with the Crowd's Eyes

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2015)

  This paper presents SmartWrap, a Firefox extension that enables sighted web users — including nonprogrammers — to create reusable "wrappers" that extract the semantic structure of visually-presented datasets on web pages, making them navigable by scr…

  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • semantic annotation
  • web scraping
  • end user programming
  • data tables
  • nonvisual accessibility
  • wrapper construction

• A Semantic-Web Based Framework for Developing Applications to Improve Accessibility in the WWW

  Christos Kouroupetroglou, Michail Salampasis, Athanasios Manitsaris (2006) — Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents a Semantic Web application framework designed to improve web accessibility by adding a metadata annotation layer on top of existing web pages. The framework addresses a core problem for blind users: screen readers serialize web pa…

  • semantic web
  • ontology
  • web annotation
  • blind users
  • voice browser
  • screen readers
  • RDF
  • OWL
  • information seeking
  • crowdsourcing
  • web accessibility

• An Accessibility Evaluation Platform: Borrowing from Web 2.0

  Yui-Liang Chen, Gina Lin (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper proposes a community-driven Accessibility Evaluation Platform for Taiwan, drawing on Web 2.0 principles to supplement the government-led accessibility compliance program administered by the Research, Development & Evaluation Commission (RD…

  • accessibility evaluation
  • web 2.0
  • crowdsourcing
  • community review
  • Taiwan
  • government accessibility
  • social learning
  • accessibility policy

• A Crowdsourcing Platform for the Construction of Accessibility Maps

  Carlos Cardonha, Diego Gallo, Priscilla Avegliano, Ricardo Herrmann, Fernando Koch, Sergio Borger (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This highly cited paper (69 citations) from IBM Research Brazil presents a comprehensive crowdsourcing platform for constructing outdoor accessibility maps through two complementary data collection approaches. The first, IBM Citizen Sensing, is an ac…

  • crowdsourcing
  • accessibility mapping
  • physical accessibility
  • urban accessibility
  • citizen sensing
  • smart cities
  • mobile accessibility
  • data visualization
  • sensor data

• VizWiz: Nearly Real-Time Answers to Visual Questions

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Greg Little, Andrew Miller, Robert C. Miller, Aubrey Tatarowicz, Brandyn White, Samuel White, Tom Yeh (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper introduces VizWiz, a pioneering mobile application that enables blind and low-vision people to get nearly real-time answers to visual questions by connecting their smartphone cameras to remote paid workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Users …

  • blind and low vision
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology
  • mobile accessibility
  • human computation
  • visual question answering
  • independence
  • smartphone

• Crowdsourcing Platform for Workplace Accessibility

  Hironobu Takagi, Akihiro Kosugi, Shin Saito, Masayoshi Teraguchi (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from IBM Research Tokyo proposes Crowd Card, an intra-organizational crowdsourcing platform designed to improve workplace accessibility while maintaining confidentiality of business materials. The core problem is that modern workplaces are…

  • crowdsourcing
  • workplace accessibility
  • image description
  • video captioning
  • document accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • intranet
  • confidentiality

• Citizen Sensing for Collaborative Construction of Accessibility Maps

  Kelly Shigeno, Sergio Borger, Diego Gallo, Ricardo Herrmann, Mateus Molinaro, Carlos Cardonha, Fernando Koch, Priscilla Avegliano (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This demo paper presents IBM Sidewalks, a mobile application developed by IBM Research Brazil that enables citizens to collaboratively report physical accessibility issues in urban environments through crowdsourcing. The application is part of IBM's …

  • crowdsourcing
  • accessibility mapping
  • mobile application
  • physical accessibility
  • urban accessibility
  • citizen sensing
  • data visualization
  • smart cities

• Legion Scribe: Real-Time Captioning by the Non-Experts

  Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Raja Kushalnagar, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This demo paper introduces Legion Scribe, a system that enables real-time captioning of speech by harnessing 3-5 ordinary typists working simultaneously, rather than relying on expensive professional stenographers. Real-time captioning provides text …

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • crowdsourcing
  • real-time captioning
  • communication accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • human computation

• Making Arabic PDF books accessible using gamification

  Hend AlRouqi, Hend S. Al-Khalifa (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses the inaccessibility of Arabic PDF books for people with visual impairments, blindness, and dyslexia. Most online Arabic books are scanned images of printed originals, making them unreadable by screen readers and text-to-speech so…

  • document accessibility
  • gamification
  • crowdsourcing
  • OCR
  • Arabic accessibility
  • print disability
  • multilingual accessibility