Literature Reviews

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

• Decidos: Accessible, Usable and Secure Voting in Low-stakes Elections Using Identity Wallets

  Floris Jansen, Hanna Schraffenberger, Bart Jacobs (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Jansen, Schraffenberger, and Jacobs (Radboud University) propose Decidos, a prototype web-based election platform designed for low-stakes elections — student councils, homeowners associations, small shareholder meetings, local citizen consultations —…

  • voting accessibility
  • e-voting
  • internet voting
  • identity wallet
  • verifiable credentials
  • privacy
  • security
  • civic participation
  • plain language
  • WCAG

• 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

• Towards a Universal Accessibility for Textual Information

  Vasile Topac (2011) — Proceedings of the International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This student award paper from Politehnica University Timisoara proposes a universal framework for understanding and addressing textual information accessibility across all media formats and contexts — not just web accessibility, but also document acc…

  • content adaptation
  • cloud computing
  • text-to-speech
  • speech recognition
  • multilingual accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • plain language
  • accessibility frameworks

• Measuring Text Simplification with the Crowd

  Walter S. Lasecki, Luz Rello, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper investigates whether non-expert crowd workers can reliably evaluate the simplicity of English text, addressing a key gap in text simplification research. Text simplification — reducing the lexical and syntactic complexity of sentences whil…

  • text simplification
  • crowdsourcing
  • natural language processing
  • readability
  • cognitive accessibility
  • plain language

• Widening access to online health education for lung cancer: a feasibility study

  Julia Mueller, Alan Davies, Simon Harper, Caroline Jay, Chris Todd (2016) — Proceedings of the 13th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents a feasibility study of "When2Go," a web-based lung cancer symptom appraisal tool designed to reach populations typically excluded from online health information: older adults with low education levels, low health literacy, and psy…

  • health literacy
  • healthcare accessibility
  • plain language
  • personalization
  • aging
  • digital inclusion
  • online health information
  • patient empowerment

• Reading Experiences and Interest in Reading-Assistance Tools Among Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Computing Professionals

  Oliver Alonzo, Lisa Elliot, Becca Dingman, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2020)

  This study investigates whether Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) computing professionals are interested in Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) tools to assist with reading in their professional work. ATS software rewrites text to improve readability us…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic text simplification
  • reading accessibility
  • natural language processing
  • assistive technology
  • workplace accessibility
  • plain 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