Literature Reviews

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

• AXECC: Benchmarking the Privacy and Accessibility Impact of Browser Extensions

  James Clarke, Maryam Mehrnezhad, Ehsan Toreini (2026) — ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security

  This paper presents AXECC, a novel automated framework for jointly measuring the web-tracking behaviour and accessibility impact of browser extensions at scale. The authors argue that while browser extensions are widely installed to improve the brows…

  • browser extensions
  • web tracking
  • privacy
  • accessibility testing
  • automated testing
  • WCAG
  • WAVE
  • Lighthouse
  • dark mode
  • screen readers
  • assistive technology

• Improving the outcomes of students with cognitive and learning disabilities: phase I development for a web accessibility tool

  Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by Web…

  • cognitive accessibility
  • cognitive disabilities
  • learning disabilities
  • cognitive load
  • evaluation tools
  • WAVE
  • WebAIM
  • web accessibility
  • students
  • education
  • automated testing

• The Transparency of Automatic Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools: Design Criteria, State of the Art, and User Perception

  Marco Manca, Vanessa Palumbo, Fabio Paternò, Carmen Santoro (2023) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper investigates a critical but often overlooked problem in web accessibility practice: the lack of transparency in automated accessibility evaluation tools. While these tools are widely used to identify WCAG violations, users frequently strug…

  • automated testing
  • accessibility evaluation tools
  • WAVE
  • axe
  • Lighthouse
  • MAUVE++
  • transparency
  • usability
  • WCAG compliance