Literature Reviews

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

• Speaker-Aware Affective Captioning for Multi-Speaker STEM Talk in Inclusive Classrooms

  Sunday David Ubur, Denis Gracanin, Stephanie P DeHart, Enoch Katey Akli, Fatemeh Sarshartehrani, Sikiru Adewale (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Ubur and colleagues at Virginia Tech address a specific failure mode of live captioning in classroom and meeting settings: collapsing multi-speaker discourse into a single text stream that obscures who said what and how it was said. They argue this i…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • speaker diarization
  • speech emotion recognition
  • STEM education
  • classroom accessibility
  • automatic speech recognition

• Silence is a Feature, Not a Bug: A Deaf Developer’s Autoethnography on Agency and Local AI

  Chenyang Gong (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26)

  This CHI 2026 Extended Abstract is a three-page autoethnographic provocation by a Deaf computer science graduate student who uses a MED-EL cochlear implant. The author refuses the medical-model framing of deafness as deficit and instead argues that t…

  • autoethnography
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • cochlear implant
  • automatic speech recognition
  • captioning
  • local-first software
  • privacy
  • crip technoscience
  • AI accessibility

• Speech AI for All: The What, How, and Who of Measurement

  Kimi Wenzel, Alisha Pradhan, Maria Teleki, Tobias M. Weinberg, Robin Netzorg, Alyssa Hillary Zisk, Anna Seo Gyeong Choi, Jingjin Li, Raja Kushalnagar, Colin Lea, Abraham Glasser, Christian Vogler, Ly Xinzhen M. Zhangsun Brown, Nan Bernstein Ratner, Allison Koenecke, Karen Nakamura, Shaomei Wu (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26) — Workshop

  This CHI 2026 workshop proposal — the second in the organisers' 'Speech AI for All' series — assembles 17 researchers, practitioners, and community advocates to tackle a specific downstream problem in fair and accessible speech AI: measurement. The m…

  • speech AI
  • automatic speech recognition
  • speech diversity
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • disfluency
  • stuttering
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • algorithmic fairness
  • accessibility research
  • workshop
  • AI FATE

• 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

• Like, Comment & Caption: A Decade of Social Media Video Caption Research (2015-2025)

  Huong Nguyen, Emma J. McDonnell, Lloyd May, Alexander Druzenko, Zoobia Saifullah Syeda, Mark Cartwright, Sooyeon Lee (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper is a systematic literature review of 36 peer-reviewed studies on Social Media Video Captions (SMVC) published between 2015 and 2025, spanning HCI, accessibility, media studies, education, and language learning. The authors use 'SM…

  • captioning
  • captions
  • video accessibility
  • social media accessibility
  • Deaf and hard of hearing
  • neurodivergence
  • language learners
  • participatory design
  • systematic literature review
  • automatic speech recognition
  • non-speech information
  • TikTok
  • YouTube

• Deaf and Hard of Hearing Access to Intelligent Personal Assistants: Comparison of Voice-Based Options with an LLM-Powered Touch Interface

  Paige S DeVries, Michaela Okosi, Ming Li, Nora Dunphy, Gidey Gezae, Dante Conway, Abraham Glasser, Raja Kushalnagar, Christian Vogler (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This mixed-methods study compares three input methods for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) people who use their voice to interact with an Amazon Echo Show: (1) natural deaf-accented speech via Alexa's built-in ASR, (2) Wizard-of-Oz 'facilitated English…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • voice assistant
  • intelligent personal assistant
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf-accented speech
  • large language model
  • accessibility
  • smart home

• Methods for Evaluation of Imperfect Captioning Tools by Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing Users at Different Reading Literacy Levels

  Larwan Berke, Sushant Kafle, Matt Huenerfauth (2018) — Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18)

  This CHI 2018 paper (awarded an Honourable Mention) is the originating methodological study behind the group’s later Alonzo et al. work on Automatic Text Simplification evaluation. It asks: when Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) participants evaluate im…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • research methodology
  • literacy
  • accessibility research
  • qualitative research

• Preferred Appearance of Captions Generated by Automatic Speech Recognition for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Viewers

  Larwan Berke, Khaled Albusays, Matthew Seita, Matt Huenerfauth (2019) — Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19)

  This CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work (6 pages) investigates a practical question that has received surprisingly little research: when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is used to caption small-group meetings for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) viewers, h…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • user interface design
  • typography
  • readability
  • videoconferencing accessibility

• Accessibility for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users: Sign Language Conversational User Interfaces

  Abraham Glasser, Vaishnavi Mande, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI '20)

  This short CUI 2020 position paper (3 pages, presented at the CUI@CHI workshop) lays out the research agenda for making voice-based conversational user interfaces (CUIs) — Alexa, Google Assistant, and similar personal assistant devices — accessible t…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • sign language
  • conversational user interfaces
  • personal assistants
  • american sign language
  • automatic speech recognition
  • universal design
  • voice interface

• Visualization of Speech Prosody and Emotion in Captions: Accessibility for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users

  Caluã de Lacerda Pataca, Matthew Watkins, Roshan Peiris, Sooyeon Lee, Matt Huenerfauth (2023) — Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23)

  This CHI 2023 paper tackles a dimension of captioning that has gone largely unaddressed for four decades: captions depict words but strip out the prosody and emotion carried by a speaker's voice. The authors argue that while automatic speech recognit…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • prosody
  • affective computing
  • videoconferencing accessibility
  • typography
  • automatic speech recognition
  • color accessibility
  • qualitative research