Literature Reviews

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

• Planning, Reasoning, and Agents for Non-Visual Navigation of Tables and Frames

  Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets 02)

  This paper from New Mexico State University extends previous work on a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for non-visual table navigation by reinterpreting it within the framework of formal action theory. The core problem addressed is that HTML tables an…

  • table accessibility
  • screen readers
  • non-visual navigation
  • semantic navigation
  • artificial intelligence
  • domain specific language
  • HTML tables

• A Domain Specific Language Framework for Non-Visual Browsing of Complex HTML Structures

  E. Pontelli, W. Xiong, G. Gupta, A. I. Karshmer (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from New Mexico State University, University of Texas at Dallas, and University of South Florida presents a framework for navigating complex HTML structures — specifically tables, frames, and forms — that are particularly challenging for s…

  • table accessibility
  • non-visual browsing
  • screen readers
  • domain specific language
  • HTML tables
  • semantic structure
  • web accessibility
  • blind users
  • conceptual graphs

• An Interactive Method for Accessing Tables in HTML

  Toshiya Oogane, Chieko Asakawa (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper from IBM Japan proposes a method for converting HTML tables into non-visual, navigable representations for screen reader users. At the time, Screen Reader/2 (the Japanese version of OS/2's screen reader) could read displayed text informati…

  • web accessibility
  • screen reader
  • HTML tables
  • table accessibility
  • blind and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • web development

• EnTable: Rewriting Web Data Sets as Accessible Tables

  Steven Gardiner, Anthony Tomasic, John Zimmerman (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This demonstration paper presents EnTable, a crowdsourcing system that transforms visually complex web data presentations into accessible HTML tables. The problem it addresses is fundamental: modern web designers communicate semantic information thro…

  • web accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • data tables
  • transcoding
  • HTML tables
  • browser extension
  • remote sighted assistance

• Tables on the web accessible? unfortunately not!

  Waqar Haider, Yeliz Yesilada (2020) — Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the first large-scale systematic study specifically focused on the accessibility of HTML tables on the web. The authors crawled approximately 30,000 web pages sourced from Google, Google Tables, and the Alexa top 10,000 sites, ult…

  • web accessibility
  • HTML tables
  • automated testing
  • WCAG compliance
  • screen readers
  • semantic HTML