Literature Reviews — A11y Paradise

Turning the Knobs of Musical Emotion: Designing Emotion-Oriented Audio Control Interface for Cochlear Implant Users

Hyojin Kim, Taein Song, Kyung Myun Lee (2026) — CHI EA '26: Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Kim, Song, and Lee (KAIST) tackle a persistent but under-designed problem in hearing accessibility: cochlear implant (CI) users can hear music but receive it in a spectrally coarse, pitch-degraded form that blunts emotional perception. Rather than pu…

Guiding Blind Pedestrians in Public Spaces by Understanding Walking Behavior of Nearby Pedestrians

Seita Kayukawa, Tatsuya Ishihara, Hironobu Takagi, Shigeo Morishima, Chieko Asakawa (2020) — Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), Vol. 4, No. 3, Article 85

Collisions with other pedestrians are one of the most common hazards for blind travellers in public space — 87.8% of blind people report colliding or nearly colliding with pedestrians, bicycles, or obstacles. White canes detect contact rather than ap…

PLUMB: An Interface for Users Who are Blind to Display, Create, and Modify Graphs

Matt Calder, Robert F. Cohen, Jessica Lanzoni, Yun Xu (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

This demonstration paper presents the latest version of PLUMB (exPLoring graphs at UMB), extending it beyond passive graph exploration to include the ability for blind and sighted users to create and modify graphs. The original PLUMB system displayed…

Using an Audio Interface to Assist Users Who are Visually Impaired with Steering Tasks

Robert F. Cohen, Valerie Haven, Jessica A. Lanzoni, Arthur Meacham, Joelle Skaff, Michael Wissell (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

This paper presents results from an ongoing study of PLUMB (exPLoring graphs at UMB), a software system that uses audio feedback and a pen-based Tablet PC interface to make relational graphs and diagrams accessible to users who are blind. Graphs — co…

Reviewing Speech Input with Audio: Differences between Blind and Sighted Users

Jonggi Hong, Christine Vaing, Hernisa Kacorri, Leah Findlater (2020) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This paper investigates how blind users identify automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors when reviewing dictated text through audio only—a critical yet understudied aspect of speech-based text entry. While speech input is a primary interaction meth…

Experimental Analysis of a Spatialised Audio Interface for People with Visual Impairments

Jacobus C. Lock, Iain D. Gilchrist, Grzegorz Cielniak, Nicola Bellotto (2020) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

This paper evaluates a spatialised audio interface designed to help people with visual impairments find objects in indoor environments. Part of the ActiVis project, the system uses a Google Project Tango mobile device with RGB-D cameras for localizat…

Audio Presentation of Auto-Suggest Lists

Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, Simon Harper (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper investigates how to make auto-suggest lists (ASLs) — the dropdown suggestions that appear as users type in search boxes and form fields — accessible through audio for visually impaired users. Part of the SASWAT (Structured Accessibility St…

Audio Access to Calendars

Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, Simon Harper (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

This paper addresses a specific but widespread accessibility problem: pop-up calendar date pickers on the web are effectively unusable by people with visual impairments. These JavaScript widgets dynamically insert tabular calendar content into the pa…