Literature Reviews

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

• An Epidemiology-inspired Large-scale Analysis of Android App Accessibility

  Anne Spencer Ross, Xiaoyi Zhang, James Fogarty, Jacob O. Wobbrock (2020) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents the largest analysis of Android app accessibility to date, testing 9,999 free apps from the Rico repository for seven distinct accessibility barriers. Drawing on epidemiological methods, the authors frame accessibility barriers as…

  • mobile accessibility
  • Android
  • TalkBack
  • screen readers
  • automated testing
  • large-scale analysis
  • accessibility barriers

• Examining Image-Based Button Labeling for Accessibility in Android Apps through Large-Scale Analysis

  Anne Spencer Ross, Xiaoyi Zhang, James Fogarty, Jacob O. Wobbrock (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of mobile app accessibility, focusing specifically on label-based accessibility barriers in image-based buttons across 5,753 free Android apps. The researchers analyzed three classes of interactive i…

  • mobile accessibility
  • Android
  • screen readers
  • image labeling
  • large-scale analysis
  • automated testing
  • content descriptions

• Towards Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This doctoral consortium extended abstract presents a PhD project proposing a novel framework and prototypical tool for optimising web accessibility evaluation through statistically representative page sampling. The work is the single-author companio…

  • automated accessibility testing
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • web crawling
  • machine learning
  • WCAG compliance
  • accessibility standards
  • large-scale analysis

• OPTIMAL-EM: Optimised Population Sourcing for Web Accessibility Evaluation

  Alexander Hambley, Yeliz Yesilada, Markel Vigo, Simon Harper (2023) — Proceedings of the 20th International Web for All Conference (W4A '23)

  This extended abstract presents OPTIMAL-EM, a prototypical tool and framework designed to optimise the web accessibility evaluation process by systematically selecting representative pages from a website for auditing. Currently, accessibility evaluat…

  • automated accessibility testing
  • web accessibility
  • accessibility evaluation
  • web crawling
  • machine learning
  • WCAG compliance
  • accessibility standards
  • large-scale analysis

• Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade

  Anukriti Kumar, Lucy Lu Wang (2024) — ASSETS '24: Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper presents a large-scale analysis of 20,000 scholarly PDFs published between 2014 and 2023 to characterise the scope and trajectory of document accessibility in academic publishing. Most scholarly works are distributed as PDFs, a format that…

  • PDF accessibility
  • scholarly publishing
  • document accessibility
  • screen readers
  • tagged PDF
  • alt text
  • open access
  • automated testing
  • large-scale analysis

• The WebAIM Million: An Annual Accessibility Analysis of the Top 1,000,000 Home Pages

  WebAIM (2024) — WebAIM

  Annual large-scale automated accessibility evaluation of the top one million website home pages. The study consistently reveals widespread accessibility failures, with the majority of pages containing detectable WCAG conformance errors.

  • automated testing
  • web accessibility
  • large-scale analysis