Literature Reviews

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

• 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

• Helping Aphasic People Process Online Information

  Siobhan Devlin, Gary Unthank (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This short paper from the University of Sunderland describes the HAPPI (Helping Aphasic People Process Information) project, a web-based text simplification system designed to help people with aphasia access online content such as news stories. Aphas…

  • aphasia
  • text simplification
  • cognitive accessibility
  • lexical simplification
  • natural language processing
  • stroke
  • reading comprehension
  • alexia

• Accessible Texts for Autism: An Eye-Tracking Study

  Victoria Yaneva, Irina Temnikova, Ruslan Mitkov (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This pioneering study is the first to use eye-tracking technology with autistic participants to evaluate text document accessibility. People with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience difficulties with reading comprehension—including processing complex…

  • autism
  • ASD
  • eye tracking
  • reading comprehension
  • easy-read
  • cognitive accessibility
  • text simplification
  • Plain English
  • visual attention

• Evaluating the Benefit of Highlighting Key Words in Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing

  Sushant Kafle, Peter Yeung, Matt Huenerfauth (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This paper investigates whether visually highlighting important words in video captions benefits Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) users, through formative studies and a larger evaluation study. DHH users face a unique visual-attention challenge when wa…

  • Deaf and hard of hearing
  • captioning
  • text highlighting
  • educational accessibility
  • video accessibility
  • reading comprehension
  • cognitive load
  • user study
  • visual attention
  • natural language processing

• A Review of 25 Years of Human-Computer Interaction Research on Reading Support Technologies for People with Disabilities Published in the ACM Digital Library

  Oliver Alonzo, Saad Hassan (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This systematic literature review analyzes 101 HCI publications from ACM venues spanning 2000 to 2024 that focus on reading support technologies for people with disabilities. The authors developed a comprehensive coding rubric covering publication me…

  • systematic literature review
  • reading support
  • reading disability
  • dyslexia
  • blind or low vision
  • deaf or hard of hearing
  • intellectual disability
  • cognitive disability
  • text simplification
  • readability
  • reading comprehension
  • braille literacy
  • assistive technology
  • web accessibility