Literature Reviews — A11y Paradise

Measuring the Semantic Accessibility Gap in LLM-Generated Web UIs

Tommaso Calo, Alexandra-Elena Gurita, Luigi De Russis (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

Calo, Gurita, and De Russis investigate a blind spot of mainstream automated accessibility tools: while scanners like Axe-core reliably catch missing alt attributes or unlabelled form fields (syntactic violations), they cannot tell whether the values…

DHTML Accessibility – Solving the JavaScript Accessibility Problem

Becky Gibson, Richard Schwerdtfeger (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

This landmark paper from IBM researchers Becky Gibson and Richard Schwerdtfeger describes the foundational work that would become WAI-ARIA. At the time of writing, JavaScript was used on over 50% of websites, yet no accessibility solution existed for…

What's New? Making Web Page Updates Accessible

Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Rohit Raman, I. V. Ramakrishnan (2008) — Assets '08: Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

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…

Building Keyboard Accessible Drag and Drop

Rucha Somani, Jiahang Xin, Bijay Bhaskar Deo, Yun Huang (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS)

This demo paper presents an API that enables web developers to create keyboard-accessible drag and drop (DnD) components for web applications, particularly e-learning systems. Drag and drop interactions are widely used in educational websites for cla…

Accessible Web Chat Interface

Valentyn Melnyk (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS)

This paper addresses the accessibility of web chat widgets — ubiquitous real-time communication tools embedded in web applications for customer support, social interaction, and service delivery. Screen readers like JAWS, VoiceOver, and NVDA do not re…

Identifying Behavioral Strategies of Visually Impaired Users to Improve Access to Web Content

Darren Lunn, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer (2011) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This paper presents a methodology for identifying how visually impaired screen reader users develop coping strategies when encountering inaccessible web content, then uses those strategies to inform the design of transcoding solutions. The researcher…

Demonstration: Screen Reader Support for a Complex Interactive Science Simulation

Taliesin L. Smith, Clayton Lewis, Emily B. Moore (2016) — ASSETS '16: Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

This demonstration presents an accessible version of "Balloons and Static Electricity," a PhET interactive science simulation that teaches electrostatic charge concepts. PhET simulations are run over 75 million times annually, yet most are inaccessib…

Ajax Live Regions: ReefChat Using the Fire Vox Screen Reader as a Case Example

Peter Thiessen, Charles Chen (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper presents ReefChat, an accessible Ajax chat application, and Fire Vox, an open-source screen reader extension for Firefox, as a proof-of-concept for WAI-ARIA live regions — one of the earliest practical demonstrations of this then-nascent s…

AxsJAX: A Talking Translation Bot Using Google IM: Bringing Web-2.0 Applications to Life

Charles L. Chen, T. V. Raman (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper from Google describes how the AxsJAX framework uses WAI-ARIA live regions to make Google Talk — an instant messaging client integrated into GMail — fully accessible to screen reader and self-voicing browser users, and demonstrates a compel…

Combining SADIe and AxsJAX to Improve the Accessibility of Web Content

Darren Lunn, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper from the University of Manchester presents a prototype system that combines two accessibility approaches — SADIe and Google's AxsJAX framework — to improve web content access for visually impaired screen reader users. SADIe (Semantic Annot…