Literature Reviews

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

• Infrastructuring for Access: Co-Designing Writing Tools with a Dyslexic Academic

  Emily Q. Wang, Aron S. Marie (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  Wang and Marie propose Infrastructuring for Access, a design approach that weaves together HCI's infrastructuring theory (Star, Pipek, Ruhleder) with Disability Studies' critique of ableism and with Repair Studies. Unlike Universal Design and Ability…

  • dyslexia
  • print disability
  • writing tools
  • spell checkers
  • infrastructuring
  • access labor
  • co-design
  • disability studies
  • assistive technology
  • neurodiversity
  • multilingual writing
  • participatory design
  • technological ableism

• Transforming Japanese Archives into Accessible Digital Books

  Tatsuya Ishihara, Toshinari Itoko, Daisuke Sato, Asaf Tzadok, Hironobu Takagi (2012) — JCDL '12: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries

  This JCDL 2012 paper from IBM Research Tokyo and Haifa tackles a problem that remained invisible in most English-focused digitisation work: producing fully accessible digital books from Japanese archives, where the writing system uses more than 10,00…

  • accessible ebooks
  • digitization
  • japanese
  • OCR
  • DAISY
  • EPUB
  • crowdsourcing
  • print disability
  • structural metadata
  • ALTO
  • kanji
  • national libraries

• Motivating Multi-Generational Crowd Workers in Social-Purpose Work

  Masatomo Kobayashi, Shoma Arita, Toshinari Itoko, Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi (2015) — CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

  This CSCW 2015 paper from IBM Research Tokyo and the University of Tokyo investigates how to sustain a volunteer community in 'social-purpose crowdsourcing' — crowd work with altruistic goals such as supporting libraries or producing materials for pe…

  • crowdsourcing
  • social-purpose crowdsourcing
  • motivation
  • gamification
  • GLAM
  • accessibility
  • assistive services
  • senior workforce
  • volunteer community
  • print disability
  • proofreading

• MathPlayer: Web-Based Math Accessibility

  Neil Soiffer (2005) — Proceedings of the 7th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '05)

  This poster paper presents MathPlayer, a free plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer developed by Design Science Inc. that renders MathML (Mathematical Markup Language) visually in web pages and makes mathematical expressions accessible to people wi…

  • mathematical accessibility
  • MathML
  • screen readers
  • print disability
  • learning disabilities
  • braille
  • STEM accessibility
  • web accessibility

• Increasing access to information for the print disabled through electronic documents in SGML

  Bart Bauwens, Jan Engelen, Filip Evenepoel, Chris Tobin, Tom Wesley (1994) — Proceedings of the First Annual ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '94)

  This paper describes work by the CAPS Consortium (Communication and Access to Information for People with Special Needs), an EU-funded project, and ICADD (International Committee on Accessible Document Design) to build accessibility into SGML (Standa…

  • document accessibility
  • SGML
  • structured documents
  • print disability
  • braille
  • large print
  • standards
  • accessible publishing
  • European accessibility

• Listen to Everything You Want to Read with Capti Narrator

  Yevgen Borodin, Yuri Puzis, Andrii Soviak, James Bouker, Bo Feng, Richard Sicoli, Andrii Melnyk, Valentyn Melnyk, Vikas Ashok, Glenn Dausch, I.V. Ramakrishnan (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents Capti Narrator, a cross-platform text-to-speech application developed by Charmtech Labs that enables hands-free consumption of digital content. Unlike traditional screen readers that are tightly coupled to operating system interfa…

  • text-to-speech
  • print disability
  • screen reader
  • mobile accessibility
  • universal access
  • reading accessibility
  • assistive technology

• Making Arabic PDF books accessible using gamification

  Hend AlRouqi, Hend S. Al-Khalifa (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper addresses the inaccessibility of Arabic PDF books for people with visual impairments, blindness, and dyslexia. Most online Arabic books are scanned images of printed originals, making them unreadable by screen readers and text-to-speech so…

  • document accessibility
  • gamification
  • crowdsourcing
  • OCR
  • Arabic accessibility
  • print disability
  • multilingual accessibility