Literature Reviews

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

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Repository for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2009) — ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Summer 2009

  This short SIGWEB Newsletter article proposes Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared federated repository for externally authored web-accessibility metadata. The authors argue that accessibility cannot scale as long as fixes depend on the original site…

  • web accessibility
  • metadata
  • semantic transcoding
  • social accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • assistive technology
  • blindness and low vision

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney…

  • multimedia
  • streaming media
  • flash
  • DHTML
  • rich internet applications
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • metadata
  • visual impairment
  • web accessibility
  • audio interference
  • keyboard navigation

• Analyzing Visual Layout for a Non-Visual Presentation-Document Interface

  Tatsuya Ishihara, Hironobu Takagi, Takashi Itoh, Chieko Asakawa (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper from IBM Japan tackles a fundamental accessibility challenge: presentation documents (like PowerPoint slides) convey information primarily through visual layout, making them inherently difficult for blind screen reader users to understand.…

  • screen readers
  • presentation accessibility
  • diagram accessibility
  • visual layout analysis
  • metadata
  • non-visual access
  • document accessibility
  • alternative interface

• Social Accessibility: Achieving Accessibility through Collaborative Metadata Authoring

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Takashi Itoh, Chieko Asakawa (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This IBM Research Tokyo paper proposes Social Accessibility, a system that applies social computing principles to web accessibility by enabling a worldwide community of volunteers to collaboratively create external accessibility metadata for inaccess…

  • web accessibility
  • social computing
  • collaborative authoring
  • metadata
  • web transcoding
  • screen reader
  • crowdsourcing
  • assistive technology

• Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato, Chieko Asakawa (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper reports on the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental service developed by IBM Research in Tokyo that uses collaborative metadata authoring to improve web accessibility. The system works through a three-part architecture: end users …

  • web accessibility
  • collaborative accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • metadata
  • screen readers
  • social computing
  • web transcoding
  • alternative text

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Infrastructure for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Darren Lunn, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper introduces Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared metadata infrastructure designed to integrate, store, and share accessibility metadata produced by diverse research projects, assistive technologies, and individual users. The authors identif…

  • web accessibility
  • metadata
  • assistive technology
  • screen readers
  • social accessibility
  • crowdsourcing
  • alternative text
  • web transcoding

• Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement

  Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Masatomo Kobayashi, Shinya Kawanaka, Chieko Asakawa (2010) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental crowdsourced service from IBM Research-Tokyo that enables volunteers to fix web accessibility problems without requiring site owners to modify their pages. L…

  • crowdsourcing
  • web accessibility
  • social computing
  • metadata
  • screen readers
  • alternative text
  • collaborative accessibility
  • blind users
  • transcoding

• Automatically producing IMS AccessForAll Metadata

  Matteo Boni, Sara Cenni, Silvia Mirri, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Paola Salomoni (2006) — Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Bologna presents the ACCMDBuilder, a software component that automatically generates IMS AccessForAll Metadata (ACCMD) descriptions for accessible learning objects (LOs). The IMS AccessForAll specification provides a…

  • e-learning accessibility
  • metadata
  • learning objects
  • multimedia accessibility
  • authoring tools
  • SCORM
  • content alternatives

• Accessible Image File Formats: The Need and the Way (Position Paper)

  Sandeep R. Patil (2007) — Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This position paper from IBM India argues that existing WCAG guidelines for image accessibility (alt text, longdesc, image maps) are insufficient because they rely on voluntary compliance by content authors and cannot address scenarios where images a…

  • image accessibility
  • alternative text
  • screen readers
  • blind users
  • visual impairment
  • metadata
  • web accessibility
  • dyslexia
  • accessible graphics

• Contextual Web Accessibility - Maximizing the Benefit of Accessibility Guidelines

  David Sloan, Andy Heath, Fraser Hamilton, Brian Kelly, Helen Petrie, Lawrie Phipps (2006) — Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This influential paper challenges the prevailing approach to web accessibility that treats WCAG conformance as the sole measure of success. The authors argue that while guidelines like WCAG are valuable tools, the persistently low levels of web acces…

  • accessibility policy
  • WCAG
  • contextual design
  • e-learning accessibility
  • inclusive design
  • accessibility frameworks
  • metadata
  • personalization
  • social inclusion