Literature Reviews

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

• Beyond Prompt-Following: Empowering Social Agency in Autistic Children through Narrative Framing

  Min Zhou, Xinheng Song, Xiaolan Peng, Mingxuan Jin, Soumya C. Barathi (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26)

  NarraSocial is a Unity-based virtual environment for autistic children aged 6–10 that reframes social-skills interventions away from the prompt-and-response loop characteristic of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and most VR-based social skills traini…

  • autism
  • autistic children
  • social agency
  • narrative design
  • virtual environment
  • serious games
  • neurodiversity
  • interaction design
  • social skills

• Virtual Environments for Social Skills Training: The Importance of Scaffolding in Practice

  Steven J. Kerr, Helen R. Neale, Sue V. G. Cobb (2002) — Proceedings of the Fifth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets 02)

  This paper describes the design and initial testing of two single-user virtual environment (VE) scenarios developed as part of the AS Interactive project, a multidisciplinary effort involving VR developers, psychologists, human factors researchers, a…

  • autism
  • virtual environment
  • social skills
  • scaffolding
  • education
  • Asperger syndrome
  • constructivism
  • virtual reality

• Technology for Just-in-Time In-Situ Learning of Facial Affect for Persons Diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder

  Miriam Madsen, Rana el Kaliouby, Matthew Goodwin, Rosalind Picard (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This MIT Media Lab paper presents a wearable technology system designed to help adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) learn to recognize and interpret facial expressions during real-time social interactions with their everyday companions. …

  • autism
  • affective computing
  • facial affect
  • emotion recognition
  • wearable technology
  • social cognition
  • assistive technology
  • computer vision
  • social skills

• Software and Technologies Designed for People with Autism: What Do Users Want?

  Cynthia Putnam, Lorna Chong (2008) — Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper reports on an online survey of 114 respondents (12 adults with ASD completing it themselves, 102 submissions about children with ASD from parents, teachers, and professionals) investigating what users actually want from software and techno…

  • autism
  • user-centered design
  • cognitive accessibility
  • assistive technology
  • educational technology
  • social skills
  • user research
  • technology adoption

• Developing for Autism with User-Centred Design

  Rachel Menzies (2011) — Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2011)

  This short paper describes the development of software designed to help children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) explore social situations, specifically the concept of sharing. The author identifies a gap in the use of User-Centred Design (UCD) …

  • autism
  • user-centred design
  • social skills
  • inclusive design
  • ethnography
  • participatory design
  • educational technology

• Accessing Peer Social Interaction: Using Authorable Virtual Peer Technology as a Component of a Group Social Skills Intervention Program

  Andrea Tartaro, Justine Cassell, Courtney Ratz, Jennifer Lira, Valeria Nanclares-Nogués (2014) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper evaluates the Authorable Virtual Peer (AVP), a life-sized animated character technology designed to support social skills development in children with autism spectrum disorders. The AVP differs from other virtual agent approaches by offeri…

  • autism
  • social skills
  • virtual peer
  • social communication
  • assistive technology
  • constructionism
  • reciprocity
  • children

• Process Measures of Dyadic Collaborative Interaction for Social Skills Intervention in Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders

  Joshua Wade, Arpan Sarkar, Amy Swanson, Amy Weitlauf, Zachary Warren, Nilanjan Sarkar (2017) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents DOSE (Dyad-Operated Social Encouragement), an open-source collaborative game and data acquisition platform designed for social skills intervention in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The system addresses a gap in e…

  • autism spectrum disorder
  • social skills
  • collaborative games
  • dyadic interaction
  • process measures
  • intervention
  • open source
  • serious games

• INC-Hg: An Intelligent Collaborative Haptic-Gripper Virtual Reality System for Children with Autism to Develop Social Skills

  Yao Zhao, Nicole Shay, Jonathan Cofino, Debra Sterling, Erin Paquette, Adriana Debarros, Maria Gillen, Michelle Won, Zhigang Zhu, Cecilia Feeley, Amy Hurst (2022) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents INC-Hg (Intelligent Collaborative Haptic-Gripper), a VR system designed to help children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) practice collaborative and social communication skills. The system addresses a significant challenge: tra…

  • autism spectrum disorder
  • virtual reality
  • collaborative learning
  • haptic feedback
  • intelligent agents
  • social skills
  • speech recognition
  • children

• Leveraging Participation: Supporting Skills Development of Young Adults with Intellectual Disability Using Social Media

  Andrew A. Bayor, Laurianne Sitbon, Bernd Ploderer, Filip Bircanin, Stewart Koplick, Margot Brereton (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper investigates how young adults with intellectual disability (ID) can leverage their existing social media participation — particularly on YouTube and Facebook — to develop new skills beyond entertainment. The researchers conducted a partici…

  • intellectual disability
  • social media
  • digital inclusion
  • participatory design
  • skills development
  • social skills
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • cognitive accessibility
  • voice search

• Design and Evaluation of a Collaborative Virtual Environment (CoMove) for Autism Spectrum Disorder Intervention

  Lian Zhang, Qiang Fu, Amy Swanson, Amy Weitlauf, Zachary Warren, Nilanjan Sarkar (2018) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This paper presents CoMove, a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) designed to measure and potentially enhance collaborative interaction and verbal communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) when playing with typically de…

  • autism
  • collaborative virtual environment
  • social skills
  • peer interaction
  • puzzle games
  • verbal communication
  • objective measurement
  • intervention
  • children