Literature Reviews

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

• Transforming Japanese Archives into Accessible Digital Books

  Tatsuya Ishihara, Toshinari Itoko, Daisuke Sato, Asaf Tzadok, Hironobu Takagi (2012) — JCDL '12: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

  This JCDL 2012 paper from IBM Research Tokyo and Haifa tackles a problem that remained invisible in most English-focused digitisation work: producing fully accessible digital books from Japanese archives, where the writing system uses more than 10,00…

  • accessible ebooks
  • digitization
  • japanese
  • OCR
  • DAISY
  • EPUB
  • crowdsourcing
  • print disability
  • structural metadata
  • ALTO
  • kanji
  • national libraries

• W4A Camp Report 2014 Edition

  Giorgio Brajnik (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This report summarizes the discussions from the 2014 W4A Camp, an unconference session held at the end of the W4A conference where accessibility researchers informally debated topics they considered important for the field. Chaired by Giorgio Brajnik…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility definitions
  • older adults
  • emotional barriers
  • EPUB
  • e-books
  • research agenda
  • inclusive design
  • digital literacy

• ChattyBooks and ChattyBook Service

  Masakazu Suzuki, Katsuhito Yamaguchi (2017) — Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This demonstration paper presents ChattyBooks, a Windows application that converts STEM content in DAISY/accessible EPUB3 format into audio-embedded HTML5 with JavaScript, enabling playback in any web browser on any platform without requiring special…

  • STEM accessibility
  • DAISY
  • EPUB
  • MathML
  • mathematics accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • blindness
  • dyslexia
  • text-to-speech
  • OCR
  • accessible publishing
  • e-textbooks
  • HTML5
  • JavaScript
  • PDF accessibility
  • SVG
  • Japan
  • education accessibility

• Making Legacy Digital Content Accessible at Source

  Sankalan Pal Chowdhary, Dipendra Manocha, M. Balakrishnan, Akashdeep Bansal, Himanshu Garg (2019) — Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This demonstration paper presents a toolset for converting legacy-encoded Devanagari text to Unicode within Adobe InDesign, addressing a significant accessibility barrier for Indian language content. Despite Unicode being published in 1991, vast amou…

  • Unicode
  • legacy encoding
  • accessible publishing
  • Devanagari
  • India
  • screen reader
  • digital inclusion
  • educational content
  • InDesign
  • EPUB

• Personalization in the Interactive EPUB 3 Reading Experience: Accessibility Issues for Screen Reader Users

  Barbara Leporini, Clara Meattini (2019) — Proceedings of the 16th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper investigates the accessibility of interactive EPUB 3 digital books when accessed via screen readers. The authors designed and developed a multimedia, interactive EPUB 3 prototype — a digital guide to Sienese cuisine featuring 8 recipe chap…

  • EPUB
  • accessible publishing
  • screen reader
  • digital books
  • personalization
  • WAI-ARIA
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • VoiceOver
  • JAWS