Literature Reviews

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

• AudioWiz: Nearly Real-Time Audio Transcriptions

  Samuel White (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This student research paper presents AudioWiz, a mobile application that provides near-real-time transcriptions of both spoken words and environmental sounds for deaf and hard of hearing users. The author identifies a critical gap in existing automat…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • audio transcription
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • environmental sounds
  • sound awareness
  • mobile accessibility

• Online Quality Control for Real-Time Crowd Captioning

  Walter S. Lasecki, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2012) — Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012)

  This paper addresses quality control in Legion:Scribe, a system that provides real-time captioning by having multiple non-expert crowd workers simultaneously type what they hear, then automatically merging their partial transcriptions into a single c…

  • real-time captioning
  • crowdsourcing
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • human computation
  • quality control
  • CART

• Real-Time Captioning by Groups of Non-Experts

  Walter Lasecki, Christopher Miller, Adam Sadilek, Andrew Abumoussa, Donato Borrello, Raja Kushalnagar, Jeffrey Bigham (2012) — UIST '12: Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

  This paper presents Legion:Scribe, an end-to-end system that enables groups of non-expert typists to collectively produce real-time captions for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, offering a cheaper and more available alternative to professional …

  • real-time captioning
  • crowdsourcing
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • human computation
  • text alignment
  • CART alternatives
  • assistive technology
  • speech recognition

• Using Real-time Feedback to Improve Visual Question Answering

  Yu Zhong, Phyo Thiha, Grant He, Walter Lasecki, Jeffrey Bigham (2012) — CHI EA '12: CHI '12 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This work-in-progress paper introduces Legion:View, a system that extends the VizWiz model of crowd-powered visual question answering by adding a real-time feedback loop between blind users and crowd workers. The original VizWiz allowed blind users t…

  • visual question answering
  • crowdsourcing
  • blind users
  • real-time systems
  • assistive technology
  • human computation
  • VizWiz
  • mobile accessibility

• Chorus: A Crowd-Powered Conversational Assistant

  Walter S. Lasecki, Rachel Wesley, Jeffrey Nichols, Anand Kulkarni, James F. Allen, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — UIST '13: Proceedings of the 26th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

  This paper presents Chorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant that enables users to hold natural, continuous conversations with what appears to be a single partner, but is actually backed by multiple crowd workers operating in real-time. The s…

  • crowdsourcing
  • conversational assistants
  • human computation
  • dialog systems
  • real-time systems
  • situational disability

• Adaptive Time Windows for Real-Time Crowd Captioning

  Matthew J. Murphy, Christopher D. Miller, Walter S. Lasecki, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — CHI EA '13: CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This paper addresses a key barrier to real-time captioning access for deaf and hard of hearing people: the high cost of professional stenographers, who can charge up to $200 per hour. Building on the Legion:Scribe system, which demonstrated that grou…

  • real-time captioning
  • crowdsourcing
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • assistive technology
  • human computation
  • CART alternatives

• WearWrite: Crowd-Assisted Writing from Smartwatches

  Michael Nebeling, Alexandra To, Anhong Guo, Adrian A. de Freitas, Jaime Teevan, Steven P. Dow, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2016) — Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2016)

  WearWrite is a system that enables users to write documents from their smartwatches by leveraging crowd workers to translate ideas into text. The system addresses the fundamental limitation that smartwatches have severely constrained input/output — t…

  • crowdsourcing
  • wearable technology
  • human computation
  • collaborative writing
  • mobile accessibility
  • conversational interface

• Answering Visual Questions with Conversational Crowd Assistants

  Walter S. Lasecki, Phyo Thiha, Yu Zhong, Erin Brady, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2013)

  This paper introduces Chorus:View, a system that enables blind users to get visual questions answered through continuous conversational interaction with multiple crowd workers viewing a live video stream from the user's mobile device. The system addr…

  • blind and low vision
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • assistive technology
  • visual assistance
  • VizWiz
  • conversational interface
  • mobile accessibility

• Real-Time Crowd Labeling for Deployable Activity Recognition

  Walter S. Lasecki, Young Chol Song, Henry Kautz, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2013)

  Legion:AR is a system that provides deployable activity recognition by combining real-time crowd labeling with automatic recognition using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The system addresses a critical limitation of current activity recognition: automa…

  • activity recognition
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • machine learning
  • aging in place
  • cognitive accessibility
  • smart environments
  • privacy
  • assistive technology

• Real-Time Captioning by Non-Experts with Legion Scribe

  Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Raja Kushalnagar, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2013)

  This short paper introduces Legion Scribe (Scribe), a system that enables 3-5 non-expert typists to collectively caption speech in real time, achieving accuracy approaching that of a professional stenographer at 20-30% of the cost. The system address…

  • real-time captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • assistive technology
  • captioning