Literature Reviews

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

• "Siri Talks at You": An Empirical Investigation of Voice-Activated Personal Assistant (VAPA) Usage by Individuals Who Are Blind

  Ali Abdolrahmani, Ravi Kuber, Stacy M. Branham (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This UMBC and UC Irvine study is one of the first to examine how individuals who are blind use voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) like Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home, and what barriers they encounter. The researchers interviewed 14 legal…

  • blindness
  • voice interface
  • voice assistant
  • Siri
  • Amazon Echo
  • Google Home
  • smart speaker
  • mobile accessibility
  • privacy
  • social acceptability

• Reading Between the Guidelines: How Commercial Voice Assistant Guidelines Hinder Accessibility for Blind Users

  Stacy M. Branham, Antony Rishin Mukkath Roy (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents a qualitative document review of public-facing voice assistant design guidelines published by five leading commercial vendors — Amazon (Alexa), Google (Google Assistant), Microsoft (Cortana), Apple (Siri), and Alibaba (Xiao AI) — …

  • voice assistant
  • blind
  • visual impairment
  • conversational user interfaces
  • design guidelines
  • Alexa
  • Siri
  • Google Assistant
  • screen readers
  • accessibility barriers