Literature Reviews

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

• Automatic Text Simplification Tools for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults: Benefits of Lexical Simplification and Providing Users with Autonomy

  Oliver Alonzo, Matthew Seita, Abraham Glasser, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20)

  This CHI 2020 paper is the first empirical study of lexical Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) adult readers, and introduces user autonomy as a central design variable in accessibility ATS tools. Prior ATS researc…

  • automatic text simplification
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • lexical simplification
  • user autonomy
  • reading accessibility
  • readability
  • user experience
  • qualitative research

• Helping Aphasic People Process Online Information

  Siobhan Devlin, Gary Unthank (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This short paper from the University of Sunderland describes the HAPPI (Helping Aphasic People Process Information) project, a web-based text simplification system designed to help people with aphasia access online content such as news stories. Aphas…

  • aphasia
  • text simplification
  • cognitive accessibility
  • lexical simplification
  • natural language processing
  • stroke
  • reading comprehension
  • alexia

• Simplify or Help? Text Simplification Strategies for People with Dyslexia

  Luz Rello, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion (2013) — Proceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper evaluates two automatic lexical simplification strategies designed to make text more accessible for people with dyslexia. The research addresses a key gap: while previous tools for dyslexic readers focused on text presentation (fonts, spac…

  • dyslexia
  • text simplification
  • readability
  • cognitive accessibility
  • eye tracking
  • lexical simplification
  • natural language processing
  • user study

• Evaluation of DysWebxia: A Reading App Designed for People with Dyslexia

  Luz Rello, Ricardo Baeza-Yates (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the evaluation of DysWebxia, an iOS reading application specifically designed for people with dyslexia. The app integrates evidence-based text presentation features known to improve reading performance for people with dyslexia — i…

  • dyslexia
  • reading accessibility
  • text simplification
  • lexical simplification
  • mobile accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • natural language processing
  • personalization

• A plug-in to aid online reading in Spanish

  Luz Rello, Roberto Carlini, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents CASSA, a free Chrome browser plug-in designed to help people read Spanish text on the web by providing simpler synonyms and definitions on demand for complex words. The tool builds on the CASSA (Context Aware Synonym Simplificatio…

  • text simplification
  • lexical simplification
  • dyslexia
  • cognitive accessibility
  • readability
  • browser extension
  • assistive technology
  • Spanish language

• Design and Evaluation of an Automatic Text Simplification Prototype with Deaf and Hard-of-hearing Readers

  Oliver Alonzo, Sooyeon Lee, Akhter Al Amin, Mounica Maddela, Wei Xu, Matt Huenerfauth (2024) — ASSETS '24: Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper investigates the design preferences and interactions of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) readers with automatic text simplification (ATS) tools. Many DHH individuals who use sign language as their primary language experience English as a sec…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • text simplification
  • reading accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • lexical simplification
  • syntactic simplification
  • plain language
  • user study