Literature Reviews

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

• 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…

  • cochlear implant
  • music accessibility
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • audio interface
  • musical emotion
  • valence-arousal
  • personalization
  • HCI

• 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

• Social Play Between Deaf and Hard of Hearing Children and Hearing Peers: Learning from Children and School Ecosystems

  Jing Zhao, Isabel Neto, Michaela Okosi, Paulo Vaz de Carvalho, Hugo Nicolau (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper investigates how Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) children and their hearing peers engage in social play on school playgrounds, and how the surrounding school ecosystem shapes those interactions. The authors frame the work with Bron…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • DHH children
  • social play
  • school ecosystem
  • peer culture
  • child agency
  • field study
  • bilingual education
  • deaf culture
  • inclusive education
  • sign language
  • cochlear implant
  • hearing aid

• Designing a Generative AI-Assisted Music Psychotherapy Tool for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Individuals

  Youjin Choi, JaeYoung Moon, JinYoung Yoo, Jennifer G. Kim, Jin-Hyuk Hong (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Choi and colleagues designed, built, and evaluated a generative-AI music psychotherapy tool co-designed with licensed Korean music therapists for deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) users. The work is motivated by the observation that music psychotherapy …

  • music therapy
  • deaf accessibility
  • DHH
  • generative AI
  • conversational agent
  • songwriting
  • mental health
  • cochlear implant
  • LLM
  • co-design
  • multimodal
  • HCI

• Audio-Visual Speech Understanding in Simulated Telephony Applications by Individuals with Hearing Loss

  Linda Kozma-Spytek, Paula Tucker, Christian Vogler (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper presents two within-subjects experiments (conducted in 2009 and 2012 with 24 and 22 participants respectively) investigating how video frame rate and audio-video synchrony affect speech understanding by people with hearing loss during simu…

  • hearing loss
  • hard of hearing
  • lipreading
  • speechreading
  • video telephony
  • telecommunications accessibility
  • audio-video synchronization
  • frame rate
  • cochlear implant

• Nothing to Hide: Aesthetic Customization of Hearing Aids and Cochlear Implants in an Online Community

  Halley P. Profita, Abigale Stangl, Laura Matuszewska, Sigrunn Sky, Shaun K. Kane (2016) — Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16)

  This paper analyzes aesthetic customization practices within a Facebook community of over 4,800 members dedicated to decorating and personalizing hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs). Approximately 48 million people in the United States (20…

  • hearing aid
  • cochlear implant
  • DIY assistive technology
  • social accessibility
  • disability identity
  • online communities
  • self-expression
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • disability culture

• Voice Telephony for Individuals with Hearing Loss: The Effects of Audio Bandwidth, Bit Rate and Packet Loss

  Linda Kozma-Spytek, Paula Tucker, Christian Vogler (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents three experiments conducted over three years with a total of 114 individuals with hearing loss (68 cochlear implant users and 46 hearing aid users) and 12 hearing controls, investigating how audio quality parameters in telecommuni…

  • hearing loss
  • telecommunications
  • cochlear implant
  • hearing aid
  • audio quality
  • VoIP
  • wideband audio
  • speech intelligibility
  • accessibility standards