Literature Reviews

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

• Corpus Studies in Word Prediction

  Keith Trnka, Kathleen F. McCoy (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the University of Delaware investigates how the choice and combination of training corpora affects the performance of statistical word prediction systems for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices. The fundamental ch…

  • word prediction
  • AAC
  • language model
  • natural language processing
  • corpus linguistics
  • keystroke savings
  • topic modeling
  • n-gram
  • augmentative communication
  • communication rate

• A Predictive Blissymbolic to English Translation System

  Annalu Waller, Kris Jack (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '02)

  This paper addresses a fundamental limitation of Blissymbolics in electronic AAC: while Blissymbol users can compose messages by selecting symbols, converting those symbol sequences into grammatically correct English is non-trivial. Blissymbolics is …

  • AAC
  • Blissymbolics
  • natural language processing
  • symbol communication
  • predictive text
  • communication rate
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • translation
  • language generation

• Adapting Word Prediction to Subject Matter without Topic-Labeled Data

  Keith Trnka (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper proposes a method for adapting word prediction systems to the current topic of discourse without requiring human-labeled topic categories in the training data. Word prediction is a key feature of Augmentative and Alternative Communication …

  • word prediction
  • AAC
  • language model
  • topic modeling
  • natural language processing
  • keystroke savings
  • communication rate
  • text entry

• Utterance-Based Systems: Organization and Design of AAC Interfaces

  Timothy J. Walsh (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper describes the design and development of an utterance-based AAC interface for literate, high-functioning adults who need communication support in public situations such as restaurants or shops. The central design challenge in AAC interfaces…

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • interface design
  • utterance-based system
  • communication rate
  • assistive technology
  • speech generation

• User Interaction with Word Prediction: The Effects of Prediction Quality

  Keith Trnka, John McCaw, Debra Yarrington, Kathleen F. McCoy, Christopher Pennington (2009) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This study investigates how the quality of word prediction systems affects both communication speed and user behavior in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The researchers conducted a controlled experiment with 33 adult participants wh…

  • AAC
  • word prediction
  • language models
  • communication rate
  • user study
  • assistive technology

• Measuring the Performance of a Location-Aware Text Prediction System

  Luís Filipe Garcia, Luís Caldas De Oliveira, David Martins De Matos (2015) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This study rigorously evaluates whether adding location awareness to word and sentence prediction improves communication efficiency for AAC users. The researchers developed Eugénio, a Portuguese AAC system that combines traditional word prediction wi…

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • word prediction
  • sentence prediction
  • location-awareness
  • context-aware computing
  • language models
  • communication rate