Literature Reviews

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

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney…

  • multimedia
  • streaming media
  • flash
  • DHTML
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • metadata
  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • audio interference
  • keyboard navigation

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on M…

  • flash
  • transcoding
  • automatic repair
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • visual impairment
  • assistive technology
  • web accessibility
  • MSAA

• TAIG: textually accessible information graphics

  Seniz Demir (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This short paper presents TAIG (Textually Accessible Information Graphics), a system designed to make bar charts and other information graphics accessible to people with visual impairments by generating coherent natural language summaries. TAIG exten…

  • data visualization
  • graph summarization
  • screen readers
  • visual impairment
  • natural language generation
  • bar charts
  • alternative text
  • information graphics

• Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato, Chieko Asakawa (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper reports on the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental service developed by IBM Research in Tokyo that uses collaborative metadata authoring to improve web accessibility. The system works through a three-part architecture: end users …

  • web accessibility
  • collaborative accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • metadata
  • screen readers
  • social computing
  • web transcoding
  • alternative text

• Interactive SIGHT Demo: Textual Summaries of Simple Bar Charts

  Seniz Demir, David Oliver, Edward Schwartz, Stephanie Elzer, Sandra Carberry, Kathleen F. McCoy (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This demonstration paper presents Interactive SIGHT, a browser extension designed to make simple bar charts found in online popular media (newspapers, magazines) accessible to people with visual impairments. The system goes beyond providing raw data …

  • information graphics
  • data visualization
  • blindness
  • screen readers
  • natural language generation
  • alternative text
  • bar charts
  • web accessibility
  • browser extension

• WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Ryan S. Kaminsky, Richard E. Ladner, Oscar M. Danielsson, Gordon L. Hempton (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper introduces WebInSight, a system that automatically generates and inserts alternative text for web images that lack it. The authors first establish the scale of the problem through a series of web studies examining five groups of important …

  • web accessibility
  • alternative text
  • image accessibility
  • OCR
  • optical character recognition
  • transformation proxy
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • automated labeling
  • crowdsourcing

• WebinSitu: A Comparative Analysis of Blind and Sighted Browsing Behavior

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Anna C. Cavender, Jeremy T. Brudvik, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Richard E. Ladner (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper presents WebinSitu, a remote in situ study comparing the web browsing behavior of 10 blind and 10 sighted users over a one-week period. The study used an advanced web proxy built on UsaProxy that injected JavaScript into viewed pages to re…

  • web accessibility
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • browsing behavior
  • user research
  • remote study
  • coping strategies
  • alternative text
  • dynamic content
  • AJAX
  • skip links

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Infrastructure for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Darren Lunn, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper introduces Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared metadata infrastructure designed to integrate, store, and share accessibility metadata produced by diverse research projects, assistive technologies, and individual users. The authors identif…

  • web accessibility
  • metadata
  • assistive technology
  • screen readers
  • social accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • alternative text
  • web transcoding

• Increasing Web Accessibility by Automatically Judging Alternative Text Quality

  Jeffrey P. Bigham (2007) — Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2007)

  This paper presents a machine learning classifier that can automatically judge whether alternative text assigned to web images is appropriate or inappropriate, using contextual features rather than visual analysis of the image itself. The research ad…

  • alternative text
  • web accessibility
  • machine learning
  • screen readers
  • automated testing
  • image accessibility
  • blind and low vision

• "With most of it being pictures now, I rarely use it": Understanding Twitter's Evolving Accessibility to Blind Users

  Meredith Ringel Morris, Annuska Zolyomi, Catherine Yao, Sina Bahram, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Shaun K. Kane (2016) — Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016)

  This multi-method study examines how blind people use Twitter and the accessibility barriers they face as the platform shifts from text-based to increasingly image-heavy content. The researchers combined an online survey of 132 blind Twitter users, l…

  • social media accessibility
  • blind users
  • alternative text
  • image description
  • Twitter
  • privacy
  • disability disclosure