Literature Reviews

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

• When the World Opens Up: Journeys of People with Intellectual Disabilities in Social Virtual Reality

  Alexandra Covaci, Winnie Tsang, Sophia Ppali, Paraskevi Triantafyllopoulou, Monica Perusquia-Hernandez, Oscar Zhou, Fotis Liarokapis, Marios Constantinides, Mohamed Khamis, Shujun Li (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper challenges the dominant remedial paradigm in HCI research on virtual reality and people with intellectual disabilities (ID), which has largely framed VR as a tool for training functional life skills (cooking, shopping, transport) …

  • intellectual disability
  • virtual reality
  • social VR
  • VRChat
  • disability justice
  • participatory design
  • self-determination
  • interdependence
  • digital citizenship
  • crip technoscience
  • reflexive thematic analysis
  • easy read

• A Diary Study in Social Virtual Reality: Impact of Avatars with Disability Signifiers on the Social Experiences of People with Disabilities

  Kexin Zhang, Elmira Deldari, Yaxing Yao, Yuhang Zhao (2023) — ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper presents a two-week diary study exploring how avatars with disability signifiers (DS) affect the social experiences of people with disabilities (PWD) in social virtual reality platforms, specifically VRChat. Disability signifiers are visua…

  • social virtual reality
  • disability signifiers
  • avatars
  • harassment
  • identity expression
  • disability disclosure
  • VRChat
  • diary study