Literature Reviews

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

• Developing usable CAPTCHAs for blind users

  Jonathan Holman, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, John D'Arcy (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from a Towson University team led by Jonathan Lazar — joined by Jonathan Holman, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and John D'Arcy of Notre Dame — addresses the long-standing accessibility problem that text-based CAPTCHAs (the distort…

  • CAPTCHA
  • audio CAPTCHA
  • blindness and low vision
  • screen readers
  • web accessibility
  • security
  • usability
  • universal usability
  • Turing test
  • visual impairment
  • multimodal
  • JAWS
  • Window-Eyes

• Inspiring Blind High School Students to Pursue Computer Science with Instant Messaging Chatbots

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Maxwell B. Aller, Jeremy T. Brudvik, Jessica O. Leung, Lindsay A. Yazzolino, Richard E. Ladner (2008) — Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE '08)

  This paper describes the design and delivery of a four-day computer science workshop for fifteen blind high school students at the National Federation of the Blind Youth Slam, where two hundred blind and low vision students explored disciplines often…

  • accessible education
  • blind students
  • screen readers
  • computer science education
  • inclusive design
  • CAPTCHA
  • assistive technology
  • programming education
  • universal design

• Evaluating Existing Audio CAPTCHAs and an Interface Optimized for Non-Visual Use

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Anna C. Cavender (2009) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009)

  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 …

  • blind and low vision
  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • CAPTCHA
  • authentication
  • non-visual interfaces
  • usability testing
  • accessibility barriers

• Towards A Universally Usable Human Interaction Proof: Evaluation of Task Completion Strategies

  Graig Sauer, Jonathan Lazar, Harry Hochheiser, Jinjuan Feng (2010) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper addresses a critical accessibility barrier: CAPTCHAs and human-interaction proofs (HIPs) that effectively lock people with visual impairments out of web services. Prior research showed that blind users could only solve audio CAPTCHAs about…

  • CAPTCHA
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • universal usability
  • web security
  • authentication

• The Status of Using "Big Eye" Chinese Screen Reader on "Wretch" Blog in Taiwan

  Yui-Liang Chen, Yung-Yu Ho (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This short paper examines the accessibility of Wretch Blog (wretch.cc), one of the most popular blogging platforms in Taiwan, when used with "Big Eye," a Chinese-language screen reader. The authors find that most core functionality of the blog works …

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • blind users
  • blogging
  • multilingual accessibility
  • navigation
  • alternative text
  • CAPTCHA
  • Global Accessibility
  • Chinese language

• Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Usable and Secure Audio reCAPTCHA

  Mohit Jain, Rohun Tripathi, Ishita Bhansali, Pratyush Kumar (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents reCAPGen, a system that automatically generates usable and secure audio CAPTCHAs by leveraging the gap between human and machine speech recognition abilities. Visual CAPTCHAs — the dominant form of online human verification — are …

  • CAPTCHA
  • audio accessibility
  • blind
  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • speech recognition
  • security
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers