Literature Reviews

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

• V-Lynx: Bringing the World Wide Web to Sight Impaired Users

  Mitchell Krell, Davor Cubranic (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This 1996 paper from the University of Southern Mississippi presents V-Lynx, one of the earliest voice-enabled web browsers designed to make the World Wide Web accessible to sight-impaired users. At this time, WWW traffic had only recently become sig…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • speech synthesis
  • web browser
  • blind users
  • non-visual browsing
  • HTML
  • hypertext navigation
  • accessibility history

• How Accessible is the Process of Web Interface Design?

  Kirk Norman, Yevgeniy Arber, Ravi Kuber (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '13)

  This short paper investigates the accessibility challenges faced by blind web interface developers through interviews with six legally blind participants (all male, aged 29-48) who had experience building websites and online applications. Five used J…

  • blind developers
  • web development
  • screen readers
  • programming accessibility
  • JAWS
  • collaborative design
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • workplace accessibility
  • developer tools

• Accessibility Assessment of Violations on the Stack Overflow Platform

  Ingrid M. Miranda da Silva, Luciano Arruda Teran, Marcelle Pereira Mota (2022) — Proceedings of the 21st Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC)

  This study investigates whether code snippets shared on Stack Overflow — one of the world's most popular developer Q&A platforms with over 120 million monthly visitors — follow web accessibility guidelines. The researchers built a tool called A11y Re…

  • web accessibility
  • repository mining
  • software development
  • code quality
  • WCAG compliance
  • developer awareness
  • automated testing
  • HTML
  • CSS

• 20 years on: the Dexter Model of Hypertext and its impact on web accessibility

  Robert Dodd (2008) — SIGACCESS Access. Comput.

  This paper examines the Dexter Reference Model of Hypertext, published in 1988, and asks whether the foundational assumptions it encodes still serve the needs of accessibility twenty years later. The Dexter Model was created as a superset description…

  • hypertext models
  • HTML
  • assistive technology
  • adaptive content
  • web standards