Literature Reviews

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

• Design and Evaluation of an American Sign Language Generator

  Matt Huenerfauth, Liming Zhao, Erdan Gu, Jan Allbeck (2007) — Proceedings of the Workshop on Embodied Language Processing (EmbodiedNLP 2007)

  Huenerfauth, Zhao, Gu, and Allbeck (2007) describe the implementation and user evaluation of a prototype system for generating animations of American Sign Language (ASL) classifier predicates — spatially complex hand movements that trace the location…

  • ASL
  • American Sign Language
  • deaf accessibility
  • sign language
  • sign language animation
  • sign language generation
  • signing avatar
  • virtual human
  • animation
  • classifier predicates
  • non-manual markers
  • eye gaze
  • Signed English
  • transliteration
  • inverse kinematics
  • user-based evaluation
  • evaluation methodology
  • Deaf community
  • computational linguistics
  • natural language generation

• A Multi-Path Architecture for Machine Translation of English Text into American Sign Language Animation

  Matt Huenerfauth (2004) — Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop at HLT-NAACL 2004

  Huenerfauth's 2004 student-research-workshop paper proposes a 'multi-path' (or 'pyramidal') architecture for English-to-American Sign Language machine translation that unifies the three classical MT paradigms — direct, transfer, and interlingua — int…

  • ASL
  • American Sign Language
  • deaf accessibility
  • sign language
  • sign language animation
  • sign language generation
  • sign language machine translation
  • machine translation
  • MT architecture
  • interlingua
  • transfer machine translation
  • direct machine translation
  • signing avatar
  • animation
  • computational linguistics
  • virtual reality
  • classifier predicates
  • English literacy
  • natural language generation

• American Sign Language natural language generation and machine translation

  Matt Huenerfauth (2005) — SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing

  Matt Huenerfauth's 2005 paper describes a research programme to build an English-to-American Sign Language (ASL) machine translation (MT) system that generates animations of a 3D virtual-reality signing character. The author frames the project agains…

  • ASL
  • American Sign Language
  • deaf accessibility
  • sign language
  • sign language animation
  • sign language generation
  • sign language machine translation
  • machine translation
  • natural language generation
  • signing avatar
  • animation
  • computational linguistics
  • virtual reality
  • English literacy
  • classifier predicates

• Implementation and Evaluation of Animation Controls Sufficient for Conveying ASL Facial Expressions

  Hernisa Kacorri, Matt Huenerfauth (2014) — Proceedings of the 16th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility (ASSETS '14)

  This ASSETS 2014 short paper (2 pages) reports an infrastructure contribution to sign-language-animation research: the authors extended an existing virtual human character (Max, on the open-source EMBR animation platform) with a full set of MPEG-4 Fa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • facial expression
  • animation
  • accessibility research

• Empirical Investigation of Users' Preferred Timing Parameters for American Sign Language Animations

  Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20)

  This CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work (7 pages) investigates a narrow but consequential HCI question: what timing values should be used when generating American Sign Language (ASL) animations from a script, so that Deaf viewers find them comfortable to wa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • web accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • animation

• A Parametric Approach to Sign Language Synthesis

  Amanda Irving, Richard Foulds (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This paper describes a parametric approach to synthesizing American Sign Language (ASL) using a commercially available human avatar (UGS Jack) driven by kinematic parameters. The system addresses the fundamental challenge that signed and spoken langu…

  • sign language
  • sign language synthesis
  • signing avatar
  • American Sign Language
  • animation
  • deaf accessibility
  • fingerspelling
  • motion capture

• VRML-Based Representations of ASL Fingerspelling on the World Wide Web

  S. Augustine Su, Richard K. Furuta (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper presents techniques for representing American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling using 3D hand models in VRML 2.0 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) on the World Wide Web. The authors argue that VRML offers a more effective way to documen…

  • sign language
  • American Sign Language
  • fingerspelling
  • VRML
  • virtual reality
  • web accessibility
  • deaf accessibility
  • 3D modeling
  • animation

• Evaluation of a psycholinguistically motivated timing model for animations of American Sign Language

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

  This paper investigates how psycholinguistic insights about the timing and speed of American Sign Language (ASL) can improve computer-generated sign language animations. The author developed two algorithms — a sign-duration algorithm and a pause-inse…

  • sign language
  • American Sign Language
  • animation
  • natural language generation
  • deaf accessibility
  • psycholinguistics
  • sign language synthesis

• Comparing Native Signers' Perception of American Sign Language Animations and Videos via Eye Tracking

  Hernisa Kacorri, Allen Harper, Matt Huenerfauth (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper investigates whether eye tracking can serve as an alternative or complementary evaluation method for assessing the quality of synthesized American Sign Language (ASL) animations. Computer-generated ASL animations offer accessibility benefi…

  • sign language
  • American Sign Language
  • animation
  • eye tracking
  • deaf accessibility
  • facial expression
  • user study
  • sign language synthesis

• Accurate and Accessible Motion-Capture Glove Calibration for Sign Language Data Collection

  Matt Huenerfauth, Pengfei Lu (2010) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper addresses a critical bottleneck in sign language technology research: the calibration of motion-capture gloves used to record hand movements for ASL animation and recognition systems. Motion-capture data enables the development of sign lan…

  • sign language
  • American Sign Language
  • deaf accessibility
  • motion capture
  • animation
  • sign language recognition
  • assistive technology
  • research methodology
  • accessible research