Literature Reviews

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

• Reading with Diversity in Mind: Pupillometry and Typography Towards Inclusive Design for ADHD Readers

  Borano Llana, Alisa Baron, Haihan Yu, Maedeh Hosseinpour, Yusra Suhail, Sean Chin, Kushas Khadka, Shaun Wallace (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Llana and colleagues at the University of Rhode Island examine how typographic choices interact with ADHD when reading digital text. The motivation is practical: digital reading is now the default for most education and work, and small typographic de…

  • readability
  • typography
  • ADHD
  • eye tracking
  • pupillometry
  • cognitive accessibility
  • reading

• SituFont: A Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention Interface for Enhancing Mobile Readability in Situational Visual Impairments

  Jingruo Chen, Kexin Nie, Mingshan Zhang, Chun Yu, Zhiqi Gao, Kun Yue, Yuanchun Shi, Chen Liang (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  SituFont is a smartphone reading interface that treats situational visual impairment (SVI) as a first-class design target and dynamically adjusts font parameters in response to real-time context. The authors argue that static accessibility settings a…

  • situational visual impairment
  • situationally induced impairments and disabilities
  • adaptive typography
  • just-in-time adaptive intervention
  • human-in-the-loop
  • mobile accessibility
  • readability
  • context-aware computing
  • machine learning
  • personalization
  • Chinese text

• Eye Gaze Behaviour and Comprehension of Colour Commentary and Gameplay Captions of Live Fast-Paced Sports for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Television Viewers

  Somang Nam, Tatyana Kumarasamy, Maria Karam, Margot Whitfield, Evan Hibbard, Jenny Leung, Deborah Fels (2026) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This ACM TACCESS study evaluates a novel captioning approach for live fast-paced sports broadcasting: 'Reduced Captioning' that displays only the colour commentary (opinions, context, analysis) and omits the verbatim play-by-play narration. The autho…

  • closed captioning
  • live captioning
  • broadcasting
  • sports
  • eye tracking
  • Deaf
  • Hard of Hearing
  • readability
  • cognitive accessibility
  • user study

• 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

• Preferred Appearance of Captions Generated by Automatic Speech Recognition for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Viewers

  Larwan Berke, Khaled Albusays, Matthew Seita, Matt Huenerfauth (2019) — Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '19)

  This CHI 2019 Late-Breaking Work (6 pages) investigates a practical question that has received surprisingly little research: when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is used to caption small-group meetings for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) viewers, h…

  • captioning
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • user interface design
  • typography
  • readability
  • videoconferencing accessibility

• Automatic Text Simplification Tools for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Adults: Benefits of Lexical Simplification and Providing Users with Autonomy

  Oliver Alonzo, Matthew Seita, Abraham Glasser, Matt Huenerfauth (2020) — Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20)

  This CHI 2020 paper is the first empirical study of lexical Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) with Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) adult readers, and introduces user autonomy as a central design variable in accessibility ATS tools. Prior ATS researc…

  • automatic text simplification
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • lexical simplification
  • user autonomy
  • reading accessibility
  • readability
  • user experience
  • qualitative research

• 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

• Comparing Evaluation Techniques for Text Readability Software for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

  Matt Huenerfauth, Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad (2009) — Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper investigates how to properly evaluate text simplification software designed for adults with mild intellectual disabilities (ID). The authors are developing a system that automatically simplifies news articles, displays them, and reads them…

  • intellectual disability
  • text simplification
  • readability
  • natural language processing
  • evaluation methodology
  • comprehension
  • cognitive accessibility
  • assistive technology