Literature Reviews

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

• Steering Generative Models for Accessibility: EasyRead Image Generation

  Nicolas Dickenmann, Yanis Merzouki, Sonia Laguna, Thy Nowak-Tran, Emanuele Palumbo, Julia E. Vogt, Gerda Binder (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Dickenmann and colleagues (ETH Zurich and UNICEF Digital Impact Division) present the first open-source pipeline for generating Easy Read-style pictograms using a fine-tuned diffusion model. Easy Read pairs short sentences with simple, high-contrast …

  • diffusion models
  • stable diffusion
  • LoRA
  • generative AI
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • pictograms
  • Easy Read
  • AAC
  • symbol communication
  • image generation

• A Web Based Multi-Linguists Symbol-to-Text AAC Application

  Chaohai Ding, Nawar Halabi, Lama Al-Zaben, Yunjia Li, E. A. Draffan, Mike Wald (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents Symbol Dragoman, a web-based augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) application that enables users who have no spoken language to communicate in both Arabic and English using pictographic symbols. The core problem addres…

  • AAC
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • symbol communication
  • multilingual accessibility
  • Arabic
  • natural language generation
  • pictograms
  • web accessibility
  • text-to-speech

• Automatic Natural Language Generation Applied to Alternative and Augmentative Communication for Online Video Content Services using SimpleNLG for Spanish

  Silvia García-Méndez, Milagros Fernández-Gavilanes, Enrique Costa-Montenegro, Jonathan Juncal-Martínez, Francisco Javier González-Castaño (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper presents the development of a Spanish version of SimpleNLG — a natural language generation (NLG) library — specifically enhanced for Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) applications. The work addresses a gap at the inter…

  • AAC
  • natural language processing
  • pictograms
  • Spanish
  • natural language generation
  • autism
  • communication accessibility
  • video accessibility
  • speech and language