Literature Reviews

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

• Design and Evaluation of an American Sign Language Generator

  Matt Huenerfauth, Liming Zhao, Erdan Gu, Jan Allbeck (2007) — Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing (EmbodiedNLP 2007)

  Huenerfauth, Zhao, Gu, and Allbeck (2007) describe the implementation and user evaluation of a prototype system for generating animations of American Sign Language (ASL) classifier predicates — spatially complex hand movements that trace the location…

  • ASL
  • American Sign Language
  • deaf accessibility
  • sign language
  • sign language animation
  • sign language generation
  • signing avatar
  • virtual human
  • animation
  • classifier predicates
  • non-manual markers
  • eye gaze
  • Signed English
  • transliteration
  • inverse kinematics
  • user-based evaluation
  • evaluation methodology
  • Deaf community
  • computational linguistics
  • natural language generation

• Variable frame rate for low power mobile sign language communication

  Neva Cherniavsky, Anna C. Cavender, Richard E. Ladner, Eve A. Riskin (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This paper from the University of Washington MobileASL team — Neva Cherniavsky, Anna Cavender, Richard Ladner, and Eve Riskin — addresses a then-emerging problem: enabling Deaf people in the United States to hold real-time American Sign Language conv…

  • American Sign Language
  • sign language
  • fingerspelling
  • Deaf community
  • video phone
  • mobile accessibility
  • MobileASL
  • video compression
  • frame rate
  • turn-taking
  • support vector machine
  • computer vision
  • low power
  • multimedia accessibility
  • deaf and hard of hearing

• Evaluating American Sign Language Generation Through the Participation of Native ASL Signers

  Matt Huenerfauth, Liming Zhao, Erdan Gu, Jan Allbeck (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper addresses the challenge of generating animations of American Sign Language (ASL) sentences, focusing specifically on classifier predicates — complex spatial constructions that describe the location, movement, size, and shape of objects. Wh…

  • sign language generation
  • American Sign Language
  • classifier predicates
  • animation evaluation
  • natural language generation
  • Deaf community
  • accessibility technology
  • user-based evaluation

• A Systematic Review of User Studies as a Basis for the Design of Systems for Automatic Sign Language Processing

  Soraia Prietch, J. Alfredo Sánchez, Josefina Guerrero (2022) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This systematic literature review examines how user studies have been conducted in the design of Automatic Sign Language Processing (ASLP) systems. The authors searched seven repositories plus Google Scholar, identifying 2,486 papers and ultimately s…

  • sign language
  • automatic sign language processing
  • user studies
  • participatory design
  • Deaf community
  • systematic literature review
  • sign language recognition
  • sign language generation
  • sign language translation

• Who is speaking: Unpacking In-text Speaker Identification Preference of Viewers who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing while Watching Live Captioned Television Program

  Akhter Al Amin, Joseph Mendis, Raja Kushalnagar, Christian Vogler, Matt Huenerfauth (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This study systematically investigates how the number of speakers onscreen in live television programs affects Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) viewers' preferences for different in-text speaker identification methods in captions. Live TV news and inte…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • captioning
  • live captioning
  • television accessibility
  • caption quality
  • caption customization
  • media accessibility
  • user preferences
  • Deaf community

• Exploring Collaboration to Center the Deaf Community in Sign Language AI

  Rie Kamikubo, Abraham Glasser, Alex X Lu, Hal Daumé III, Hernisa Kacorri, Danielle Bragg (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper investigates the critical disconnect between machine learning (ML) practitioners and Deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers in the development of sign language AI technologies. Despite sign language processing's promise for societal inc…

  • Deaf community
  • sign language
  • American Sign Language
  • machine learning
  • participatory AI
  • co-design
  • interdisciplinary collaboration
  • AI ethics
  • community-centered design
  • sign language recognition