Literature Reviews

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

• A Comparison of Features for Automatic Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Martin Jansche, Matt Huenerfauth, Noémie Elhadad (2010) — Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING '10), Posters

  Feng et al. (2010) is a computational-linguistics paper that compares a wide variety of text features for automatically predicting the grade level of reading material aimed at primary-school students. The motivation is both intrinsic — traditional re…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • natural language processing
  • machine learning
  • language models
  • computational linguistics
  • POS features
  • discourse features
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • entity grid
  • coreference
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • grade level prediction
  • reading level
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • support vector machines
  • classification

• Improved Inference and Autotyping in EEG-based BCI Typing Systems

  Andrew Fowler, Brian Roark, Umut Orhan, Deniz Erdogmus, Melanie Fried-Oken (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '13)

  This paper presents improvements to the RSVP Keyboard, a brain-computer interface (BCI) typing system designed for people with severe motor disabilities, particularly those with locked-in syndrome (LIS) resulting from ALS or brain stem stroke who can…

  • brain-computer interface
  • BCI
  • EEG
  • text entry
  • locked-in syndrome
  • ALS
  • AAC
  • language models
  • P300
  • assistive technology
  • motor disability

• COMPA: Using Conversation Context to Achieve Common Ground in AAC

  Stephanie Valencia, Jessica Huynh, Emma Y Jiang, Yufei Wu, Teresa Wan, Zixuan Zheng, Henny Admoni, Jeffrey P Bigham, Amy Pavel (2024) — Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24)

  This paper presents COMPA, a browser extension add-on tool designed to help AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) users and their conversation partners achieve common ground during online group conversations. The core problem is speed asym…

  • AAC
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • communication accessibility
  • group conversation
  • common ground
  • language models
  • conversation context
  • speech production disabilities

• User Interaction with Word Prediction: The Effects of Prediction Quality

  Keith Trnka, John McCaw, Debra Yarrington, Kathleen F. McCoy, Christopher Pennington (2009) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This study investigates how the quality of word prediction systems affects both communication speed and user behavior in augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). The researchers conducted a controlled experiment with 33 adult participants wh…

  • AAC
  • word prediction
  • language models
  • communication rate
  • user study
  • assistive technology

• Measuring the Performance of a Location-Aware Text Prediction System

  Luís Filipe Garcia, Luís Caldas De Oliveira, David Martins De Matos (2015) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This study rigorously evaluates whether adding location awareness to word and sentence prediction improves communication efficiency for AAC users. The researchers developed Eugénio, a Portuguese AAC system that combines traditional word prediction wi…

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • word prediction
  • sentence prediction
  • location-awareness
  • context-aware computing
  • language models
  • communication rate