Literature Reviews

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

• The semantic web, web accessibility, and device independence

  Lisa Seeman (2004) — Proceedings of the 2004 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  Written by Lisa Seeman of UB Access, this paper argues that Semantic Web technologies — particularly RDF (Resource Description Framework) annotations — can dramatically improve web accessibility beyond what WCAG guidelines alone can achieve, especial…

  • semantic web
  • RDF
  • cognitive accessibility
  • learning disabilities
  • personalization
  • knowledge representation
  • assistive technology

• A Syntactic Analysis of Accessibility to a Corpus of Statistical Graphs

  Leo Ferres, Petro Verkhogliad, Livia Sumegi, Louis Boucher, Martin Lachance, Gitte Lindgaard (2008) — Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from Carleton University and Statistics Canada tackles a persistent accessibility challenge: making statistical graphs accessible to blind and visually impaired users. The authors analysed a corpus of 120 real-world statistical graphs from…

  • data visualization
  • graph accessibility
  • blind and low vision
  • alt text
  • knowledge representation
  • automated accessibility
  • statistical graphics

• Semantic Web: The Story So Far

  Ian Horrocks (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This W4A 2007 keynote paper by Ian Horrocks of the University of Manchester provides an overview of the Semantic Web vision and the progress made toward realizing it, with particular focus on the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The paper opens by identi…

  • semantic web
  • ontology
  • OWL
  • knowledge representation
  • web standards
  • linked data

• Using Ontologies as a Foundation for Web Accessibility Tools

  Jens Pelzetter (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This extended abstract proposes using formal ontologies — machine-readable knowledge representations using languages like OWL (Web Ontology Language) — as the foundation for web accessibility tools, addressing two major problems: supporting developer…

  • web accessibility
  • ontologies
  • WCAG
  • knowledge representation
  • automated testing
  • semantic web
  • OWL
  • accessibility evaluation
  • developer tools