Literature Reviews

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

• Gist Summaries for Visually Impaired Surfers

  Simon Harper, Neha Patel (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This paper from the University of Manchester addresses a fundamental problem in web accessibility for visually impaired users: the inability to quickly assess a web page's relevance before committing to having the entire page read aloud by a screen r…

  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • text summarization
  • screen readers
  • cognitive overload
  • web browsing
  • document engineering
  • browser extension
  • information architecture

• Enabling the blind in virtual worlds

  William S. Carter (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from IBM's Human Ability and Accessibility Center describes experimental techniques for enabling blind users to participate in virtual world environments. Unlike conventional web content where text and images can be given alternative descr…

  • virtual reality
  • blindness
  • virtual worlds
  • multimodal interaction
  • cognitive overload
  • avatar
  • spatial navigation
  • assistive technology

• Captions Versus Transcripts for Online Video Content

  Raja S. Kushalnagar, Walter S. Lasecki, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper investigates a fundamental challenge for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users consuming online video: while hearing viewers can watch and listen simultaneously using separate sensory channels, DHH viewers must process two competing visual …

  • captioning
  • deaf accessibility
  • transcripts
  • online education
  • MOOCs
  • video accessibility
  • cognitive overload
  • multimedia accessibility