Literature Reviews

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

• Lost in Translation: Understanding Autistic-Neurotypical Communication Style Differences in Job Postings

  Huining Feng, Zinat Ara, Andrew Hundt, Slobodan Vucetic, John Joon Young Chung, Sungsoo Ray Hong (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper investigates a concrete and consequential site of autistic-neurotypical (NT) communication mismatch: the written job posting. Autistic adults face an approximately 85% unemployment or underemployment rate (compared to 4% in the ge…

  • autism
  • autistic communication
  • communication style differences
  • autistic employment
  • double empathy problem
  • pragmatic language
  • workplace accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • large language models
  • data annotation
  • disability justice

• Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad, Matt Huenerfauth (2009) — Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009)

  Feng, Elhadad, and Huenerfauth (2009) develop and evaluate an automatic readability-assessment tool targeted specifically at adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) — people in the 'mild' category (IQ 55-70), who comprise roughly 3% of the U.S. po…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • mild intellectual disability
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • working memory
  • discourse features
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • reading level
  • reading comprehension
  • user study
  • natural language processing
  • named entity recognition
  • computational linguistics
  • text-to-speech
  • literacy
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • cognitively motivated features

• 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

• Collecting a Motion-Capture Corpus of American Sign Language for Data-Driven Generation Research

  Pengfei Lu, Matt Huenerfauth (2010) — Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT '10)

  This workshop paper describes the first year of a multi-year project at CUNY to build a motion-capture corpus of American Sign Language (ASL) specifically intended to support data-driven ASL animation and machine-translation research. The authors arg…

  • American Sign Language
  • ASL animation
  • motion capture
  • sign language corpus
  • deaf accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • signing avatar
  • data-driven generation
  • computational linguistics
  • sign language machine translation

• Empirical Investigation of Users' Preferred Timing Parameters for American Sign Language Animations

  Sedeeq Al-khazraji, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '20)

  This CHI 2020 Late-Breaking Work (7 pages) investigates a narrow but consequential HCI question: what timing values should be used when generating American Sign Language (ASL) animations from a script, so that Deaf viewers find them comfortable to wa…

  • american sign language
  • sign language animation
  • signing avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • web accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • animation

• Comparison of Methods for Evaluating Complexity of Simplified Texts among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults at Different Literacy Levels

  Oliver Alonzo, Jessica Trussell, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2021) — Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21)

  This CHI 2021 paper is the companion methodological study to Alonzo et al.'s 2022 fluency work: where that later paper asked how to evaluate the fluency (grammaticality) of simplified texts, this one asks how to evaluate their complexity (whether the…

  • automatic text simplification
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • readability
  • reading accessibility
  • research methodology
  • literacy
  • natural language processing
  • qualitative research

• Methods for Evaluating the Fluency of Automatically Simplified Texts with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Adults at Various Literacy Levels

  Oliver Alonzo, Jessica Trussell, Matthew Watkins, Sooyeon Lee, Matt Huenerfauth (2022) — Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22)

  This CHI 2022 paper is a methodological study, not a product evaluation: the authors ask how researchers should measure the fluency of Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) output when the evaluators are Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) adults spanning a…

  • automatic text simplification
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • readability
  • reading accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • research methodology
  • literacy
  • qualitative research

• Usability Evaluation of Captions for People Who Are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

  Sushant Kafle, Matt Huenerfauth (2018) — SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing Newsletter (Issue 122)

  This is a SIGACCESS Newsletter article summarizing a line of research by Kafle and Huenerfauth on building a caption-quality evaluation metric that actually reflects the experience of Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) readers — rather than simply counti…

  • automatic speech recognition
  • captioning
  • captions
  • caption quality
  • accessibility metrics
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • real-time captioning
  • accessibility research
  • natural language processing

• SIBYLLE: a system for alternative communication adapting to the context and its user

  Tonio Wandmacher, Jean-Yves Antoine, Franck Poirier (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This paper describes the latest version of SIBYLLE, an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system developed at the Université François Rabelais and the Université Européenne de Bretagne for users with severe motor and speech impairments …

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • AAC
  • word prediction
  • virtual keyboard
  • single switch
  • scanning
  • latent semantic analysis
  • language model
  • keystroke saving rate
  • text-to-speech
  • locked-in syndrome
  • cerebral palsy
  • rehabilitation
  • multilingual accessibility
  • natural language processing

• Semantic & syntactic context-aware text entry methods

  Jun Gong (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Jun Gong's Assets '07 demonstration paper proposes a context-aware extension to the dictionary-based predictive disambiguation (DBPD) text-entry methods — the family that included the once-ubiquitous T9 on mobile phone keypads. DBPD methods let users…

  • text entry
  • motor impairment
  • visual impairment
  • predictive text
  • T9
  • natural language processing
  • disambiguation
  • mobile accessibility
  • alternative and augmentative communication
  • part-of-speech tagging