Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
7 results found tagged accessibility history.
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Touching and Hearing GUIs: Design Issues for the PC-Access System
This 1996 paper from Canada's Centre for Information Technology Innovation presents PC-Access, a pioneering multimodal system that combines haptic (touch) and auditory feedback to make Microsoft Windows graphical user interfaces accessible to visuall…
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V-Lynx: Bringing the World Wide Web to Sight Impaired Users
This 1996 paper from the University of Southern Mississippi presents V-Lynx, one of the earliest voice-enabled web browsers designed to make the World Wide Web accessible to sight-impaired users. At this time, WWW traffic had only recently become sig…
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Access and Empowerment: Commentary on "Computers and People with Disabilities"
Richard Ladner offers an optimistic assessment of progress since Glinert and York's 1992 call-to-arms, emphasizing how market forces—not just legal mandates—have driven accessibility improvements. With 16% of the U.S. population disabled and 10% of t…
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Keeping Up with Technology: Commentary on "Computers and People with Disabilities"
This reflective commentary by Alistair Edwards examines what has—and crucially, what has not—changed in accessible computing since Glinert and York's influential 1992 paper. Edwards frames his analysis through a fashion-versus-style metaphor: while t…
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Accessible Computing -- Past Trends and Future Suggestions: Commentary on "Computers and People with Disabilities"
This influential commentary by Alan Newell reflects on 15 years of progress since Glinert and York's seminal 1992 paper on computers and disability. While acknowledging advances—specialized journals, accessibility features in mainstream software, AAC…
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Computers and People with Disabilities
This is a 2008 reprint of a landmark 1992 Communications of the ACM article that issued a "call-to-arms" for research on computers and people with disabilities. Glinert and York argued that human-computer interfaces systematically failed to account f…
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Ubiquitous Accessibility, Common Technology Core, and Micro Assistive Technology: Commentary on "Computers and People with Disabilities"
This influential commentary reflects on the evolution of digital accessibility from 1992 to 2008 and proposes a vision for addressing emerging challenges. Vanderheiden, director of the Trace R&D Center, traces progress from an era when only Apple had…