Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
343 results found tagged screen readers.
-
Hunting for Headings: Sighted Labeling vs. Automatic Classification of Headings
This paper investigates the problem of missing heading markup in web pages — a significant accessibility barrier for blind screen reader users who rely on heading navigation (h1-h6 tags) to quickly skip through page content rather than reading linear…
-
What's New? Making Web Page Updates Accessible
This paper introduces Dynamo, a system that makes dynamic web page content accessible to blind screen reader users by automatically detecting changes across all types of web page updates and providing a unified interface for reviewing them. The paper…
-
Slide Rule: Making Mobile Touch Screens Accessible to Blind People Using Multi-Touch Interaction Techniques
This paper introduces Slide Rule, a set of audio-based multi-touch interaction techniques that make touch screen devices accessible to blind users without requiring any additional hardware. Published in 2008 — just one year after the iPhone launched …
-
WebAnywhere: A Screen Reader On-the-Go
This demonstration paper introduces WebAnywhere, a web-based, self-voicing screen reader that enables blind users to access the web from any computer with a standard browser and sound output, without needing to install specialized software. The paper…
-
Trailblazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web
This paper introduces TrailBlazer, a system designed to help blind web users complete tasks more efficiently by providing step-by-step guidance through web pages. The core problem it addresses is that blind users relying on screen readers must often …
-
Accessibility by Demonstration: Enabling End Users to Guide Developers to Web Accessibility Solutions
This paper introduces Accessibility by Demonstration (ABD), a novel approach to accessibility evaluation that lets assistive technology users record the accessibility problems they encounter as shareable, replayable demonstrations and send them direc…
-
Evaluating Existing Audio CAPTCHAs and an Interface Optimized for Non-Visual Use
This paper presents the first large-scale evaluation of audio CAPTCHAs — the purportedly accessible alternative to visual CAPTCHAs — revealing that they are dramatically more difficult for both blind and sighted users. The study gathered 10 types of …
-
Increasing Web Accessibility by Automatically Judging Alternative Text Quality
This paper presents a machine learning classifier that can automatically judge whether alternative text assigned to web images is appropriate or inappropriate, using contextual features rather than visual analysis of the image itself. The research ad…
-
An Uninteresting Tour Through Why Our Research Papers Aren't Accessible
This paper provides a candid examination of why academic research papers, delivered almost exclusively as PDFs, remain largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. The authors — who have spent years actively trying to improve the situation — tra…
-
"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…