Literature Reviews

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

• Challenges in Automatic Speech Recognition for Adults with Cognitive Impairment

  Michelle Cohn, Alyssa Lanzi, Yui Ishihara, Chen-Nee Chuah, Georgia Zellou, Alyssa Weakley (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper quantifies how well state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) handles voice commands produced by older adults with cognitive impairment, and asks which acoustic features actually predict transcription accuracy. The autho…

  • automatic speech recognition
  • ASR
  • dementia
  • Alzheimer's disease
  • mild cognitive impairment
  • AgeTech
  • voice assistant
  • Amazon Alexa
  • Whisper
  • aging in place
  • ability-based design
  • acoustic analysis
  • word error rate
  • smart home
  • human-in-the-loop

• visiBabble Demo

  Harriet Fell, Joel MacAuslan, Jun Gong, Josh Ostrow (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This paper presents a demonstration of visiBabble, a computer-based system designed to encourage and reinforce pre-speech vocalizations in infants at risk of being nonspeaking due to neurological or oral/motor impairments. The system consists of a no…

  • early intervention
  • pre-speech vocalizations
  • speech technology
  • visual feedback
  • assistive technology
  • child development
  • AAC
  • acoustic analysis

• visiBabble for Reinforcement of Early Vocalization

  Harriet Fell, Cynthia Cress, Joel MacAuslan, Linda Ferrier (2003) — Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '04)

  This paper presents visiBabble, a real-time system that detects syllable-like vocalizations in infant babbling and responds with brightly coloured animations as visual reinforcement. The system targets infants at risk for speech impairments due to co…

  • early intervention
  • speech and language
  • child development
  • acoustic analysis
  • developmental disabilities
  • cerebral palsy
  • biofeedback
  • assistive technology
  • speech technology
  • AAC

• Automatic Babble Recognition for Early Detection of Speech Related Disorders

  Harriet J. Fell, Joel MacAuslan, Karen Chenausky, Linda J. Ferrier (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper presents the Early Vocalization Analyzer (EVA), a program that automatically analyzes digitized recordings of infant babbling to detect syllable boundaries, with the goal of screening infants who may be at risk for later communication prob…

  • early intervention
  • speech technology
  • child development
  • speech disorders
  • babbling
  • acoustic analysis
  • developmental disabilities
  • screening

• EVA, an Early Vocalization Analyzer: An Empirical Validity Study of Computer Categorization

  Harriet J. Fell, Linda J. Ferrier, Zehra Mooraj, Etienne Benson, Dale Schneider (1996) — Proceedings of the Second Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '96)

  This paper from Northeastern University presents EVA (Early Vocalization Analyzer), a Macintosh-based software tool that automatically analyzes digitized recordings of infant vocalizations to support early identification of speech and language delays…

  • early intervention
  • speech and language
  • acoustic analysis
  • infant vocalization
  • babbling
  • developmental disability
  • clinical tools
  • signal processing

• A system for teaching speech to profoundly deaf children using synthesized acoustic and articulatory patterns

  E. Keate, H. Javkin, N. Antonanzas-Barroso, R. Zou (1994) — Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '94)

  This paper describes a PC-based computer-assisted speech training system for profoundly deaf children that integrates a text-to-speech (TTS) synthesizer to generate both acoustic and articulatory models for any typed utterance. The system addresses a…

  • deaf education
  • speech training
  • text-to-speech
  • palatography
  • visual feedback
  • acoustic analysis
  • articulation
  • speech synthesis
  • deaf children
  • computer-aided instruction
  • formant analysis