Literature Reviews

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

• iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility

  Peya Mowar, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper from Mowar, Steinfeld, and Bigham (Carnegie Mellon) presents iTagPDF, an automated system for tagging academic research PDFs so they are accessible to screen reader users. The authors argue that PDF accessibility has remained a pe…

  • PDF accessibility
  • tagged PDF
  • PDF remediation
  • automated accessibility
  • document layout analysis
  • LLM
  • vision-language models
  • LaTeX
  • alt text
  • reading order
  • scholarly publishing
  • automated testing

• Proposing New Metrics to Evaluate Web Usability for the Blind

  Kentarou Fukuda, Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2005) — CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This four-page CHI '05 extended abstract argues that existing automated accessibility checkers — in 2005 typified by Bobby — had plateaued: they verified the presence of ALT attributes, labels, and markup conformance, yet real blind users still found…

  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • accessibility metrics
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • blindness and low vision
  • automated accessibility
  • alt text
  • accessibility testing

• Making the Web Easier to See with Opportunistic Accessibility Improvement

  Jeffrey P. Bigham (2014) — ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

  This paper introduces the concept of "opportunistic accessibility improvement" — the idea that accessibility enhancements like magnification should be automatically applied to the maximum extent possible without causing negative side effects. The aut…

  • low vision
  • magnification
  • web accessibility
  • responsive design
  • screen magnification
  • JavaScript
  • browser extension
  • automated accessibility

• A Syntactic Analysis of Accessibility to a Corpus of Statistical Graphs

  Leo Ferres, Petro Verkhogliad, Livia Sumegi, Louis Boucher, Martin Lachance, Gitte Lindgaard (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from Carleton University and Statistics Canada tackles a persistent accessibility challenge: making statistical graphs accessible to blind and visually impaired users. The authors analysed a corpus of 120 real-world statistical graphs from…

  • data visualization
  • graph accessibility
  • blind and low vision
  • alt text
  • knowledge representation
  • automated accessibility
  • statistical graphics

• Web Composition with WCAG in Mind

  Vicente Luque Centeno, Carlos Delgado Kloos, Martin Gaedke, Martin Nussbaumer (2005) — Proceedings of the 2005 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper argues that accessibility should be built into the web authoring process rather than treated as a post-design repair activity. The authors address the specific challenge of web composition — the common practice of building web pages by dyn…

  • web composition
  • authoring tools
  • WCAG compliance
  • accessibility by design
  • component-based development
  • HTML validation
  • automated accessibility

• When LLM-Generated Code Perpetuates User Interface Accessibility Barriers, How Can We Break the Cycle?

  Alexandra-Elena Gurita, Radu-Daniel Vatavu (2025) — Proceedings of the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A 2025)

  This paper evaluates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate accessible web user interfaces, comparing ChatGPT (GPT-4-turbo) and Claude (3.5 Haiku) across two prompting strategies: accessibility-agnostic prompts ("Design the homepage …

  • large language models
  • WCAG compliance
  • automated accessibility
  • prompt engineering
  • code generation
  • AI accessibility