Literature Reviews

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

• "It's Complicated": Negotiating Accessibility and (Mis)Representation in Image Descriptions of Race, Gender, and Disability

  Cynthia L. Bennett, Cole Gleason, Morgan Klaus Scheuerman, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Anhong Guo, Alexandra To (2021) — CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This qualitative study investigates how screen reader users who are also Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC), non-binary, and/or transgender navigate the complex landscape of image descriptions, particularly regarding how appearance characteri…

  • image descriptions
  • alt text
  • screen readers
  • visual impairments
  • race
  • gender
  • disability
  • AI bias
  • representation
  • intersectionality
  • identity

• Diffscriber: Describing Visual Design Changes to Support Mixed-Ability Collaborative Presentation Authoring

  Yi-Hao Peng, Jason Wu, Jeffrey Bigham, Amy Pavel (2022) — Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

  This paper presents Diffscriber, a system that identifies and describes visual design changes made to slide presentations, enabling blind and visually impaired (BVI) presenters to meaningfully participate in collaborative slide authoring with sighted…

  • blind and low vision
  • mixed-ability collaboration
  • presentation accessibility
  • authoring tools
  • screen readers
  • image descriptions
  • change detection

• What's in an ALT Tag? Exploring Caption Content Priorities through Collaborative Captioning

  Annika Muehlbradt, Shaun K. Kane (2022) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper investigates what makes a good image caption through a novel collaborative captioning methodology. Six pairs of blind and sighted partners—including married couples, friends, and roommates—worked together to create and refine captions for …

  • image descriptions
  • alt text
  • collaborative accessibility
  • cross-ability collaboration
  • screen readers
  • social media accessibility

• From Automation to User Empowerment: Investigating the Role of a Semi-automatic Tool in Social Media Accessibility

  Leticia Seixas Pereira, Jose Coelho, Andre Rodrigues, Joao Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Carlos Duarte (2024) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents SONAAR (Social Networks Accessible Authoring), a semi-automatic tool designed to improve social media accessibility by combining AI-powered image recognition with user-generated descriptions. The research addresses a persistent pr…

  • social media accessibility
  • alternative text
  • image descriptions
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology
  • user empowerment
  • automation

• "That's in the eye of the beholder": Layers of Interpretation in Image Descriptions for Fictional Representations of People with Disabilities

  Emory James Edwards, Kyle Lewis Polster, Isabel Tuason, Emily Blank, Michael Gilbert, Stacy Branham (2021) — Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '21)

  This paper investigates how to create accurate and sensitive image descriptions for fictional representations of people with disabilities — a challenge that arises when real subjects cannot be consulted about their preferred identity terminology. The…

  • image accessibility
  • alt text
  • image descriptions
  • disability representation
  • design systems
  • ableism
  • blind and low vision
  • co-design
  • identity

• Authoring accessible media content on social networks

  Letícia Seixas Pereira, José Coelho, André Rodrigues, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Carlos Duarte (2022) — Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22)

  This paper investigates why user-generated visual content on social media remains overwhelmingly inaccessible to blind and visually impaired users, despite platforms offering tools to add alternative descriptions. The researchers conducted a two-phas…

  • social media accessibility
  • alt text
  • user-generated content
  • image descriptions
  • digital inclusion
  • content authoring

• Surfacing Variations to Calibrate Perceived Reliability of MLLM-generated Image Descriptions

  Meng Chen, Akhil Iyer, Amy Pavel (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper addresses a critical safety problem in AI-powered visual access technology: multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4o, Gemini, and Claude produce fluent, confident image descriptions that can contain fabricated content, misinter…

  • blindness
  • low vision
  • image descriptions
  • multimodal AI
  • large language models
  • AI reliability
  • trust calibration
  • screen readers
  • visual access technology

• Context-Aware Image Descriptions for Web Accessibility

  Ananya Gubbi Mohanbabu, Amy Pavel (2024) — Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '24)

  This paper addresses a fundamental limitation of current AI-generated image descriptions: they describe images in isolation without considering the surrounding webpage context. When blind and low-vision (BLV) users encounter images on the web, what t…

  • alt text
  • image descriptions
  • blind and low vision
  • artificial intelligence
  • large language models
  • web accessibility
  • screen readers