Literature Reviews

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

• Analyzing Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users' Behavior, Usage, and Interaction with a Personal Assistant Device that Understands Sign-Language Input

  Abraham Glasser, Matthew Watkins, Kira Hart, Sooyeon Lee, Matt Huenerfauth (2022) — Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22)

  This CHI 2022 paper investigates how Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) ASL signers would actually use a personal assistant device (such as an Amazon Echo Show or Google Home) if it could understand American Sign Language commands. The authors position t…

  • sign language
  • american sign language
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • personal assistants
  • voice assistants
  • smart speaker
  • conversational interface
  • sign language recognition
  • accessibility research
  • wizard of oz

• Towards More Robust Speech Interactions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

  Raymond Fok, Harmanpreet Kaur, Skanda Palani, Martez E. Mott, Walter S. Lasecki (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This University of Michigan study addresses a largely overlooked accessibility gap: while much research has focused on providing deaf users access to spoken output (via captioning or sign language), almost no work has addressed improving deaf users' …

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf speech
  • crowdsourcing
  • speech intelligibility
  • voice interface
  • human computation
  • smart speaker

• "Siri Talks at You": An Empirical Investigation of Voice-Activated Personal Assistant (VAPA) Usage by Individuals Who Are Blind

  Ali Abdolrahmani, Ravi Kuber, Stacy M. Branham (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This UMBC and UC Irvine study is one of the first to examine how individuals who are blind use voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) like Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home, and what barriers they encounter. The researchers interviewed 14 legal…

  • blindness
  • voice interface
  • voice assistant
  • Siri
  • Amazon Echo
  • Google Home
  • smart speaker
  • mobile accessibility
  • privacy
  • social acceptability

• Internet of Things (IoT) as Assistive Technology: Potential Applications in Tertiary Education

  Scott Hollier, Shadi Abou-Zahra (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper explores how consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices could serve as assistive technology for students with disabilities in tertiary education, based on qualitative interviews with five students representing hearing, mobility, print…

  • Internet of Things
  • assistive technology
  • higher education
  • W3C
  • voice assistant
  • captioning
  • smart speaker
  • interoperability
  • privacy
  • digital inclusion

• VERSE: Bridging Screen Readers and Voice Assistants for Enhanced Eyes-Free Web Search

  Alexandra Vtyurina, Adam Fourney, Meredith Ringel Morris, Leah Findlater, Ryen W. White (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper identifies the complementary strengths and weaknesses of screen readers and voice assistants (VAs) for blind web searchers, then presents VERSE (Voice Exploration, Retrieval, and SEarch), a prototype that merges the best of both technologi…

  • screen readers
  • voice assistant
  • blind
  • web search
  • information retrieval
  • web accessibility
  • smart speaker
  • smartwatch
  • multimodal interaction
  • VoiceOver