Literature Reviews

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

• A context aware handheld wayfinding system for individuals with cognitive impairments

  Yao-Jen Chang, Shih-Kai Tsai, Tsen-Yung Wang (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a context-aware wayfinding system designed to help individuals with cognitive impairments navigate indoor environments independently, with a focus on workplace and community travel. The system consists of three components: a handh…

  • cognitive disability
  • wayfinding
  • QR code
  • ubiquitous computing
  • navigation
  • supported employment
  • context awareness
  • independent living
  • distributed cognition

• CATPro: context-aware task prompting system with multiple modalities for individuals with cognitive impairments

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

  This short paper presents CATPro (Context-Aware Task Prompting), a system designed to help individuals with cognitive impairments perform daily living and workplace tasks more independently. The system targets people with a range of conditions includ…

  • cognitive disability
  • task prompting
  • context awareness
  • supported employment
  • ubiquitous computing
  • Bluetooth beacons
  • assistive technology
  • independent living
  • multimodal interaction

• Automated Class Discovery and One-Shot Interactions for Acoustic Activity Recognition

  Jason Wu, Chris Harrison, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Gierad Laput (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20)

  This paper presents Listen Learner, an end-to-end system for acoustic activity recognition that automatically discovers and learns to classify environmental sounds with minimal user effort. Traditional approaches to sound recognition face a tradeoff:…

  • acoustic activity recognition
  • smart home
  • machine learning
  • Internet of Things
  • context awareness
  • self-supervised learning
  • sound recognition
  • deaf and hard of hearing

• Automatic Task Assistance for People with Cognitive Disabilities in Brushing Teeth - A User Study with the TEBRA System

  Christian Peters, Thomas Hermann, Sven Wachsmuth, Jesse Hoey (2014) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents TEBRA (TEeth BRushing Assistance), an Assistive Technology for Cognition (ATC) system that supports people with moderate cognitive disabilities in brushing their teeth independently. The research addresses a fundamental challenge:…

  • cognitive disability
  • assistive technology
  • activities of daily living
  • dementia
  • intellectual disability
  • autism
  • behavior recognition
  • context awareness
  • task assistance

• Designing a Context Aware AAC Solution

  Conor McKillop (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This student research competition paper explores the design of a context-aware AAC keyboard prototype that uses mobile device sensors — particularly GPS and Wi-Fi positioning — to suggest location-relevant phrases and categories for people with speec…

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • context awareness
  • word prediction
  • cerebral palsy
  • mobile accessibility
  • speech generating devices
  • communication
  • participatory design
  • user-centered design

• Exploring Object Status Recognition for Recipe Progress Tracking in Non-Visual Cooking

  Franklin Mingzhe Li, Kaitlyn Ng, Bin Zhu, Patrick Carrington (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper presents OSCAR (Object Status Context Awareness for Recipes), a technical pipeline that uses object status recognition—tracking the condition and transformation of ingredients and tools—to support recipe progress tracking for blind and low…

  • blind and low vision
  • cooking accessibility
  • context awareness
  • object recognition
  • computer vision
  • vision-language models
  • assistive technology
  • recipe tracking
  • non-visual interaction