Literature Reviews

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

18 results found tagged OCR.

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
PathFinder: Designing a Map-less Navigation System for Blind People in Unfamiliar Buildings

Masaki Kuribayashi, Tatsuya Ishihara, Daisuke Sato, Jayakorn Vongkulbhisal, Karnik Ram, Seita Kayukawa, Hironobu Takagi, Shigeo Morishima, Chieko Asakawa (2023) — Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Map-based indoor navigation systems for blind travellers (CaBot, NavCog, BLE-beacon apps) work well when a prebuilt map exists, but building and maintaining those maps is labour-intensive and has only been done for a tiny fraction of the world's buil…
Automated tactile graphics translation: in the field

Chandrika Jayant, Matt Renzelmann, Dana Wen, Satria Krisnandi, Richard Ladner, Dan Comden (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

This paper describes two years of field work extending the Tactile Graphics Assistant (TGA), a system developed at the University of Washington to automate the translation of figures from mathematics, science, and engineering (STEM) textbooks into em…
A Demonstration of the iCARE Portable Reader

Terri Hedgpeth, John A. Black, Jr., Sethuraman Panchanathan (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

This paper presents the portable iCARE Reader, an assistive device developed at Arizona State University that allows people who are blind or visually impaired to read printed text more naturally and conveniently than existing flatbed scanner-based re…
Instant Tactile-Audio Map: Enabling Access to Digital Maps for People with Visual Impairment

Zheshen Wang, Baoxin Li, Terri Hedgpeth, Teresa Haven (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

This paper presents an automated system for converting standard digital map images into interactive tactile-audio maps that people who are blind can explore independently. The core problem addressed is that while online map services like Google Maps …
WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible

Jeffrey P. Bigham, Ryan S. Kaminsky, Richard E. Ladner, Oscar M. Danielsson, Gordon L. Hempton (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

This paper introduces WebInSight, a system that automatically generates and inserts alternative text for web images that lack it. The authors first establish the scale of the problem through a series of web studies examining five groups of important …
New Tools for Automating Tactile Geographic Map Translation

Nizar Bouhlel, Anis Rojbi (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS)

This demo paper presents a Matlab-based software tool that semi-automates the conversion of visual geographic maps into tactile versions suitable for blind students. Tactile graphics are the most effective modality for blind people to comprehend grap…
Evaluating Haptic and Auditory Directional Guidance to Assist Blind People in Reading Printed Text Using Finger-Mounted Cameras

Lee Stearns, Ruofei Du, Uran Oh, Yumeng Wang, Leah Findlater, Rama Chellappa, Jon E. Froehlich (2016) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This paper presents HandSight, a finger-mounted camera system that enables blind people to read printed text by tracing their finger across lines while receiving real-time directional guidance to stay on track. The research addresses a significant ga…
Improving the Accessibility of Mobile OCR Apps Via Interactive Modalities

Michael Cutter, Roberto Manduchi (2017) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This paper addresses a critical usability challenge in mobile OCR for blind users: while OCR technology itself works well, it requires properly framed images at adequate resolution—something difficult to achieve without visual feedback. Blind users c…
Investigating Cursor-based Interactions to Support Non-Visual Exploration in the Real World

Anhong Guo, Saige McVea, Xu Wang, Patrick Clary, Ken Goldman, Yang Li, Yu Zhong, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

This paper from Google and Carnegie Mellon University defines and compares three cursor-based interaction techniques designed to help blind and low vision people attend to specific items within complex real-world visual scenes. While computer vision …