Literature Reviews

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

• iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility

  Peya Mowar, Aaron Steinfeld, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper from Mowar, Steinfeld, and Bigham (Carnegie Mellon) presents iTagPDF, an automated system for tagging academic research PDFs so they are accessible to screen reader users. The authors argue that PDF accessibility has remained a pe…

  • PDF accessibility
  • tagged PDF
  • PDF remediation
  • automated accessibility
  • document layout analysis
  • LLM
  • vision-language models
  • LaTeX
  • alt text
  • reading order
  • scholarly publishing
  • automated testing

• Development and Evaluation of a Tool for Assisting Content Creators in Making PDF Files More Accessible

  Debashish Pradhan, Tripti Rajput, Aravind Jembu Rajkumar, Jonathan Lazar, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I. Morariu, Varun Manjunatha (2022) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents the development and evaluation of "Ally," a web-based tool designed to help content creators remediate PDF documents for accessibility. While trillions of PDF documents exist online, only a small fraction include the metadata nece…

  • PDF accessibility
  • document remediation
  • content tagging
  • reading order
  • accessible tables
  • heading structure
  • assistive technology
  • screen readers
  • usability study

• Benchmarking PDF Accessibility Evaluation: A Dataset and Framework for Assessing Automated and LLM-Based Approaches for Accessibility Testing

  Anukriti Kumar, Tanushree Padath, Lucy Lu Wang (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper addresses a critical gap in PDF accessibility evaluation by introducing the first expert-validated benchmark dataset and standardized evaluation framework for assessing how well different tools and approaches can evaluate PDF accessibility…

  • PDF accessibility
  • automated testing
  • large language models
  • WCAG
  • PDF/UA
  • benchmark dataset
  • document accessibility
  • alternative text
  • reading order
  • semantic tagging
  • accessibility evaluation