Literature Reviews

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

• (Natural Language) Interaction with Graphical Representations of Statistical Data

  Leo Ferres, Petro Verkhogliad, Louis Boucher (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from Carleton University and Statistics Canada presents iGraph-Lite, a system that makes statistical graphs published in "The Daily" (Statistics Canada's main dissemination publication) accessible to blind and visually impaired users throu…

  • data visualization
  • blind users
  • visual impairment
  • natural language processing
  • web accessibility
  • accessible graphics
  • text-to-speech
  • data accessibility
  • government

• Enabling Access to Geo-referenced Information: Atlas.txt

  Kavita E. Thomas, Livia Sumegi, Leo Ferres, Somayajulu Sripada (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Aberdeen and Carleton University presents Atlas.txt, a data-to-text natural language generation (NLG) system designed to make geo-referenced data — such as census maps and thematic choropleth maps — accessible to vis…

  • natural language generation
  • visual impairment
  • data accessibility
  • geographic information
  • data visualization
  • screen readers
  • census data

• Sound, Touch, or the Full Monty? A Comparative Study of Accessible Data Exploration Systems for Blind Users

  Pramod Chundury, J. Bern Jordan, Yasmin Reyazuddin, Niklas Elmqvist, Jonathan Lazar (2026) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a controlled within-subject comparative study of three accessible data exploration systems representing different sensory modalities: Olli (a screen-reader-based system using hierarchical text descriptions and keyboard navigation)…

  • data visualization
  • sonification
  • tactile graphics
  • refreshable braille display
  • multimodal accessibility
  • blind users
  • screen readers
  • user study
  • data accessibility

• Tapsonic: One Dimensional Finger Mounted Multimodal Line Chart Reader

  Zeyuan Zhang (2020) — Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020)

  This short paper presents Tapsonic, a finger-mounted wearable device that enables people with visual impairments to read line charts through a combination of haptic feedback and voiceover. The key innovation is a dimensionality reduction approach: ra…

  • visual accessibility
  • data visualization
  • data accessibility
  • haptic technology
  • blindness and low vision
  • assistive technology
  • wearable technology
  • multimodal interaction

• Understanding Strategies and Challenges of Conducting Daily Data Analysis (DDA) Among Blind and Low-vision People

  Chutian Jiang, Wentao Lei, Emily Kuang, Teng Han, Mingming Fan (2023) — Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023)

  This paper investigates how blind and low-vision (BLV) people perform what the authors term Daily Data Analysis (DDA) — the common, everyday tasks of analyzing and deriving insights from data such as splitting expenses, computing stock portfolio chan…

  • blind and low vision
  • data accessibility
  • screen readers
  • spreadsheets
  • data analysis
  • think-aloud
  • qualitative study