Literature Reviews

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

• TESSA, a System to Aid Communication with Deaf People

  Stephen Cox, Michael Lincoln, Judy Tryggvason, Melanie Nakisa, Mark Wells, Marcus Tutt, Sanja Abbott (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets 02)

  This paper describes TESSA (Text and Sign Support Assistant), an experimental system developed collaboratively by the University of East Anglia, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People, and Televirtual Ltd. to facilitate communication between de…

  • deaf accessibility
  • sign language
  • British Sign Language
  • sign language avatar
  • speech recognition
  • motion capture
  • translation systems
  • communication accessibility

• The Development of Language Processing Support for the ViSiCAST Project

  R. Elliott, J. R. W. Glauert, J. R. Kennaway, I. Marshall (2000) — Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This paper from the University of East Anglia describes early work on the ViSiCAST project (Virtual Signing, Animation, Capture, Storage and Transmission), a 3-year EU-funded initiative to provide improved access to services for Deaf citizens through…

  • sign language
  • sign language avatar
  • virtual signing
  • British Sign Language
  • machine translation
  • natural language processing
  • motion capture
  • HamNoSys
  • deaf accessibility
  • XML

• Assessing the Deaf User Perspective on Sign Language Avatars

  Michael Kipp, Quan Nguyen, Alexis Heloir, Silke Matthes (2011) — Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2011)

  This paper investigates Deaf community attitudes toward sign language avatars — virtual characters that perform sign language — through focus groups and a large-scale online study. Sign language avatars have the potential to make written content acce…

  • deaf
  • sign language avatar
  • German Sign Language
  • user acceptance
  • focus groups
  • participatory design
  • sign language synthesis
  • nonmanual features
  • accessibility

• Manual Evaluation of Synthesised Sign Language Avatars

  Robert Smith, Brian Nolan (2013) — Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS)

  This poster paper evaluates whether adding emotional facial expressions to sign language avatars improves their comprehension and naturalness for Irish Sign Language (ISL) users. Sign languages convey emotion and prosody primarily through non-manual …

  • sign language
  • sign language avatar
  • Irish Sign Language
  • deaf
  • facial expressions
  • non-manual features
  • HamNoSys
  • SiGML
  • accessibility

• APSIS4all: Personalisation as a Strategy to Ensure Accessibility and Enhance User Experience of Public Digital Terminals

  R. Ignacio Madrid, Christopher Bailey (2014) — Proceedings of the 11th Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the APSIS4all project, a European Commission-funded initiative that uses personalisation to make Public Digital Terminals (PDTs) — specifically ATMs and Ticket Vending Machines (TVMs) — accessible to people with disabilities, olde…

  • kiosk accessibility
  • personalization
  • public digital terminals
  • ATM accessibility
  • user experience
  • assistive technology
  • NFC
  • sign language avatar
  • user profiles
  • adaptive interfaces

• Regression Analysis of Demographic and Technology-Experience Factors Influencing Acceptance of Sign Language Animation

  Hernisa Kacorri, Matt Huenerfauth, Sarah Ebling, Kasmira Patel, Kellie Menzies, Mackenzie Willard (2017) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This paper investigates how deaf participants' demographic backgrounds and technology experience influence their evaluation scores when assessing sign language animation systems, revealing that participant characteristics — not just animation quality…

  • sign language avatar
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • evaluation methodology
  • regression analysis
  • ASL animation
  • demographic factors
  • research methods