Literature Reviews

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

• EmojiFan: Designing A Social Interface Supporting Facial Expression Interaction for Blind and Low Vision People in Party Settings

  Jinlin Miao, Shan Luo, Yue Chen, Hongyue Wang, Zhejun Zhang, Rina R. Wehbe (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper presents EmojiFan, an AI-assisted wearable prototype designed to help blind and low-vision (BLV) adults participate in facial-expression interactions in party settings — a social context the authors identify as particularly hostil…

  • blind and low vision
  • visual impairment
  • facial expression
  • social accessibility
  • wearable technology
  • haptic feedback
  • AI-assisted assistive technology
  • emotion recognition
  • nonverbal communication
  • emoji
  • bodystorming
  • thematic analysis

• Understanding Emotion through Multimedia: Comparison between Hearing-Impaired People and People with Hearing Abilities

  Rumi Hiraga, Nobuko Kato (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper investigates how hearing-impaired and normal-hearing people recognise emotions conveyed through drum performances and accompanying visual stimuli. The research is part of a larger project to build a "performance enhancement machine" (PEM) …

  • hearing impairment
  • music accessibility
  • emotion recognition
  • multimodal
  • music visualisation
  • drum performance
  • inclusive design

• Technology for Just-in-Time In-Situ Learning of Facial Affect for Persons Diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

  Miriam Madsen, Rana el Kaliouby, Matthew Goodwin, Rosalind Picard (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This MIT Media Lab paper presents a wearable technology system designed to help adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) learn to recognize and interpret facial expressions during real-time social interactions with their everyday companions. …

  • autism
  • affective computing
  • facial affect
  • emotion recognition
  • wearable technology
  • social cognition
  • assistive technology
  • computer vision
  • social skills

• Extraction of Emotional Information via Visual Scanning Patterns: A Feasibility Study of Participants with Schizophrenia and Neurotypical Individuals

  Joshua Wade, Heathman S. Nichols, Megan Ichinose, Dayi Bian, Esube Bekele, Matthew Snodgress, Ashwaq Zaini Amat, Eric Granholm, Sohee Park, Nilanjan Sarkar (2018) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents MASI-VR (Multimodal Adaptive Social Intervention in Virtual Reality), a gaze-sensitive social skills training system designed to improve emotion recognition in adults with schizophrenia (SZ). Emotion recognition impairment is a co…

  • schizophrenia
  • emotion recognition
  • eye tracking
  • virtual reality
  • social cognition
  • gaze-sensitive systems
  • social skills training
  • mental health

• Exploring the Performance of Facial Expression Recognition Technologies on Deaf Adults and Their Children

  Irene Rogan Shaffer (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This Boston University student research paper investigates how commercial facial expression recognition services perform on Deaf ASL signers and Children of Deaf Adults (CODAs) compared to hearing non-signers. The study is motivated by a critical pro…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • sign language
  • facial expression recognition
  • emotion recognition
  • AI fairness
  • algorithmic bias
  • computer vision
  • ASL
  • CODA
  • deaf culture

• Lessons Learned in Designing AI for Autistic Adults

  Andrew Begel, John Tang, Sean Andrist, Michael Barnett, Tony Carbary, Piali Choudhury, Edward Cutrell, Alberto Fung, Sasa Junuzovic, Daniel McDuff, Kael Rowan, Shibashankar Sahoo, Jennifer Frances Waldern, Jessica Wolk, Hui Zheng, Annuska Zolyomi (2020) — ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This short paper from Microsoft Research presents a candid account of a design failure and the valuable lessons it produced. The team set out to build Video Calling for Autism (VC4A), a video calling application with an "Expressiveness Mirror" that u…

  • autism
  • artificial intelligence
  • emotion recognition
  • video calling
  • participatory design
  • Wizard of Oz
  • neurodiversity
  • facial expression

• CuCap: Comparative Analysis of Customized Captioning between North American and South Korean d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users

  Caluã de Lacerda Pataca, SooYeon Ahn, Suhyeon Yoo, JooYeong Kim, Khai N. Truong, Jin-Hyuk Hong, Roshan L Peiris, Matt Huenerfauth (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper introduces CuCap, a customizable captioning system that allows d/Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) users to personalize how paralinguistic speech features are visually represented in captions. Traditional captions convey only the words spoken…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • captioning
  • customization
  • cross-cultural study
  • speech prosody
  • typographic design
  • emotion recognition
  • personalization