Literature Reviews

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

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on M…

  • flash
  • transcoding
  • automatic repair
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • web accessibility
  • MSAA

• Transforming Flash to XML for Accessibility Evaluations

  Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper from IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory proposes a method for transforming Flash content into XML structures to enable automated accessibility evaluation. At the time of publication, Flash was installed on over 95% of personal computers and was…

  • Flash accessibility
  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • XML transformation
  • MSAA

• Programming for Usability in Nonvisual User Interfaces

  Gerhard Weber (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This short paper from Harz University addresses a fundamental problem in accessible software development: sighted developers working in visual programming environments must create interfaces that are usable nonvisually, but standard software engineer…

  • accessibility API
  • screen readers
  • software engineering
  • nonvisual interface
  • usability
  • accessibility testing
  • MSAA

• Platform-Independent Accessibility API: Accessible Document Object Model

  Andres Gonzalez, Loretta Guarino Reid (2005) — Proceedings of the 2005 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper, authored by Adobe engineers, addresses a fundamental problem in cross-platform accessibility: application developers who want to support assistive technologies must implement separate integrations for each operating system's accessibility…

  • accessibility API
  • DOM
  • cross-platform accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • MSAA
  • screen readers
  • platform independence
  • accessibility architecture