Literature Reviews

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

• Nonvisual Access to an Interactive Electric Field Simulation: Work in Progress

  Clayton Lewis, Derek Riemer (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This demonstration paper presents work-in-progress on making the PhET Project's Radiating Charge physics simulation accessible to blind users through audio representation. The PhET Project offers over 130 interactive science simulations downloaded mo…

  • blindness
  • sonification
  • STEM education
  • interactive simulation
  • inclusive design
  • auditory display
  • physics education
  • PhET

• Demonstration: Screen Reader Support for a Complex Interactive Science Simulation

  Taliesin L. Smith, Clayton Lewis, Emily B. Moore (2016) — ASSETS '16: Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This demonstration presents an accessible version of "Balloons and Static Electricity," a PhET interactive science simulation that teaches electrostatic charge concepts. PhET simulations are run over 75 million times annually, yet most are inaccessib…

  • screen reader
  • STEM education
  • interactive simulation
  • PhET
  • blind accessibility
  • ARIA
  • accessible description
  • science education
  • keyboard navigation

• Design and Evaluation of a Multimodal Science Simulation

  Brianna J. Tomlinson, Prakriti Kaini, Siyan Zhou, Taliesin L. Smith, Emily B. Moore, Bruce N. Walker (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This demonstration paper presents a multimodal version of PhET's John Travoltage interactive physics simulation, designed to support learners with and without visual impairments in exploring static electricity concepts. The key design goal was creati…

  • STEM accessibility
  • sonification
  • multimodal interface
  • visual impairment
  • science education
  • PhET
  • auditory display
  • screen readers
  • universal design
  • inclusive design

• Parallel DOM Architecture for Accessible Interactive Simulations

  Taliesin L. Smith, Jesse Greenberg, Sam Reid, Emily B. Moore (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This paper presents the Parallel DOM (PDOM) architecture developed by the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder to make their suite of 140+ free science and mathematics simulations accessible to students with visu…

  • web accessibility
  • interactive simulations
  • screen readers
  • keyboard accessibility
  • WAI-ARIA
  • STEM accessibility
  • visual impairment
  • PhET
  • DOM
  • scene graph
  • alternative input