Literature Reviews

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

• SpokeSense: Developing a Real-Time Sensing Platform for Wheelchair Sports

  Patrick Carrington, Gierad Laput, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2020) — SIGACCESS Access. Comput.

  This paper presents SpokeSense, a wheel-mounted sensing platform designed to track and analyze wheelchair basketball performance in real time. While substantial work has gone into sensing and analytics for mainstream sports, wheelchair sports have re…

  • wheelchair sports
  • adaptive sports
  • wheelchair basketball
  • wearable technology
  • sensors
  • physical activity
  • assistive technology
  • sports analytics

• Say It All: Feedback for Improving Non-Visual Presentation Accessibility

  Yi-Hao Peng, JiWoong Jang, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Amy Pavel (2021) — Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)

  This paper addresses the widespread problem of inaccessible slide-based presentations for blind and visually impaired audiences. When presenters fail to verbally describe the visual content on their slides — text, images, diagrams, graphs, and videos…

  • presentation accessibility
  • slides
  • audio description
  • blind and low vision
  • real-time feedback
  • authoring tools
  • non-visual access

• COMPA: Using Conversation Context to Achieve Common Ground in AAC

  Stephanie Valencia, Jessica Huynh, Emma Y Jiang, Yufei Wu, Teresa Wan, Zixuan Zheng, Henny Admoni, Jeffrey P Bigham, Amy Pavel (2024) — Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24)

  This paper presents COMPA, a browser extension add-on tool designed to help AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) users and their conversation partners achieve common ground during online group conversations. The core problem is speed asym…

  • AAC
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • communication accessibility
  • group conversation
  • common ground
  • language models
  • conversation context
  • speech production disabilities

• Rescribe: Authoring and Automatically Editing Audio Descriptions

  Amy Pavel, Gabriel Reyes, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2020) — Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST '20)

  This paper introduces Rescribe, a tool that helps authors create and refine audio descriptions for videos. Audio descriptions make video content accessible to blind and visually impaired viewers by narrating important visual information during gaps i…

  • audio description
  • video accessibility
  • blind and low vision
  • NLP
  • sentence compression
  • authoring tools
  • media accessibility

• "This really lets us see the entire world:" Designing a conversational telepresence robot for homebound older adults

  Yaxin Hu, Laura Stegner, Yasmine Kotturi, Caroline Zhang, Yi-Hao Peng, Faria Huq, Yuhang Zhao, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Bilge Mutlu (2024) — Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '24)

  This paper investigates how conversational telepresence robots can help homebound older adults interact with the external world. Homebound status — defined as rarely or never leaving home due to illness, injury, or environmental constraints — affects…

  • telepresence robots
  • older adults
  • homebound
  • social isolation
  • participatory design
  • conversational interface
  • assistive technology
  • remote exploration
  • aging

• 'Your Duties Are To Sweep A Floor Remotely': Low Information Quality in Job Advertisements is a Barrier to Low-Income Job-Seekers' Successful Use of Digital Platforms

  Sara Kingsley, Michael Six Silberman, Clara Wang, Robert Lambeth, Jiayin Zhi, Motahhare Eslami, Beibei Li, Jeffrey Bigham (2024) — Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction for Work (CHIWORK)

  This paper investigates barriers that low-income job-seekers face when using digital platforms to find work, based on 27 semi-structured interviews with US residents earning under $45,000 who had searched for paid work in the previous two years. The …

  • digital inclusion
  • digital divide
  • employment
  • disability employment
  • low-income users
  • platform governance
  • information quality
  • social justice
  • digital literacy

• Towards Automated Accessibility Report Generation for Mobile Apps

  Amanda Swearngin, Jason Wu, Xiaoyi Zhang, Esteban Gomez, Jen Coughenour, Rachel Stukenborg, Bhavya Garg, Greg Hughes, Adriana Hilliard, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jeffrey Nichols (2024) — ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

  This paper presents a system for automatically generating whole-app accessibility reports for mobile apps, addressing key limitations of existing accessibility scanning tools. The work begins with formative interviews with eight accessibility QA prof…

  • automated testing
  • accessibility testing
  • mobile accessibility
  • app crawling
  • machine learning
  • computer vision
  • quality assurance
  • accessibility metadata
  • screen readers

• Nonverbal Communication through Expressive Objects

  Stephanie Valencia, Mark Steidl, Michael L. Rivera, Cynthia L. Bennett, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Henny Admoni (2023) — Communications of the ACM

  This paper explores how physical motion through an expressive object — a "sidekick" — can support nonverbal communication for augmented communicators (ACs) who use AAC devices. The work centres on Mark, a co-author with cerebral palsy who has used AA…

  • AAC
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • cerebral palsy
  • nonverbal communication
  • co-design
  • participatory design
  • assistive technology
  • motor disabilities
  • turn-taking

• Screen Parsing: Towards Reverse Engineering of UI Models from Screenshots

  Jason Wu, Xiaoyi Zhang, Jeff Nichols, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2021) — The 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

  This paper introduces screen parsing, the task of predicting UI elements and their hierarchical relationships from a screenshot alone. While prior work could detect individual UI elements on a screen (element detection), those approaches produced fla…

  • screen readers
  • mobile accessibility
  • computer vision
  • UI semantics
  • machine learning
  • accessibility metadata
  • reverse engineering

• Diffscriber: Describing Visual Design Changes to Support Mixed-Ability Collaborative Presentation Authoring

  Yi-Hao Peng, Jason Wu, Jeffrey Bigham, Amy Pavel (2022) — Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

  This paper presents Diffscriber, a system that identifies and describes visual design changes made to slide presentations, enabling blind and visually impaired (BVI) presenters to meaningfully participate in collaborative slide authoring with sighted…

  • blind and low vision
  • mixed-ability collaboration
  • presentation accessibility
  • authoring tools
  • screen readers
  • image descriptions
  • change detection