Literature Reviews

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

• ChatWoz: Chatting through a Wizard of Oz

  Pedro Fialho, Luísa Coheur (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  ChatWoz is a Wizard of Oz system designed to enable autistic children to interact with caregivers through a virtual avatar. The system was motivated by widely reported cases of autistic children enthusiastically engaging with commercial virtual assis…

  • autism
  • Wizard of Oz
  • virtual agent
  • dialogue systems
  • child-caregiver interaction
  • text-to-speech
  • emotion
  • avatar
  • AAC

• What My Eyes Can't See, A Robot Can Show Me: Exploring the Collaboration Between Blind People and Robots

  Mayara Bonani, Raquel Oliveira, Filipa Correia, André Rodrigues, Tiago Guerreiro, Ana Paiva (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This University of Lisbon and University of São Paulo study explores how assistive robots can go beyond information-giving technologies (like screen readers) by physically collaborating with blind people. The research consists of two studies. Study 1…

  • blindness
  • robotics
  • human-robot interaction
  • assistive robotics
  • collaboration
  • haptic technology
  • independence
  • Wizard of Oz

• Exploring Aural and Haptic Feedback for Visually Impaired People on a Track: A Wizard of Oz Study

  Kyle Rector, Rachel Bartlett, Sean Mullan (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This University of Iowa study investigates how to make outdoor jogging tracks accessible to people who are blind or have low vision, addressing a gap in exercise accessibility research. Standard 400-meter tracks rely entirely on visual lane markings,…

  • blindness
  • low vision
  • exercise accessibility
  • navigation
  • haptic technology
  • audio feedback
  • vibration feedback
  • Wizard of Oz
  • physical activity

• Vocal Programming for People with Upper-Body Motor Impairments

  Lucas Rosenblatt, Patrick Carrington, Kotaro Hara, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This paper presents VocalIDE, a prototype voice-based integrated development environment (IDE) designed to enable people with upper-body motor impairments to write and edit computer code using speech commands rather than a keyboard. Only 4% of profes…

  • speech recognition
  • motor impairment
  • cerebral palsy
  • spinal cord injury
  • programming education
  • voice interface
  • IDE
  • Wizard of Oz
  • text entry
  • workplace accessibility

• Effect of Automatic Sign Recognition Performance on the Usability of Video-Based Search Interfaces for Sign Language Dictionaries

  Oliver Alonzo, Abraham Glasser, Matt Huenerfauth (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper investigates how the performance of automatic sign recognition technology affects user satisfaction when searching for unfamiliar words in an ASL-to-English dictionary. Looking up an unknown sign in ASL is fundamentally harder than looking…

  • sign language
  • ASL
  • sign language recognition
  • dictionary
  • Deaf and hard of hearing
  • information retrieval
  • Wizard of Oz
  • usability
  • computer vision
  • evaluation methods

• Lessons Learned in Designing AI for Autistic Adults

  Andrew Begel, John Tang, Sean Andrist, Michael Barnett, Tony Carbary, Piali Choudhury, Edward Cutrell, Alberto Fung, Sasa Junuzovic, Daniel McDuff, Kael Rowan, Shibashankar Sahoo, Jennifer Frances Waldern, Jessica Wolk, Hui Zheng, Annuska Zolyomi (2020) — ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This short paper from Microsoft Research presents a candid account of a design failure and the valuable lessons it produced. The team set out to build Video Calling for Autism (VC4A), a video calling application with an "Expressiveness Mirror" that u…

  • autism
  • artificial intelligence
  • emotion recognition
  • video calling
  • participatory design
  • Wizard of Oz
  • neurodiversity
  • facial expression