Literature Reviews

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

• SoundWeAR: Co-Designing AR Sound Cues to Support Outdoor Awareness for DHH Individuals

  Anna Surovkova, Tianze Xie, Xinan Yang, Seungwoo Je (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  SoundWeAR investigates how augmented-reality glasses can translate environmental sound into visual cues that support the situational awareness of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) people in outdoor settings - a context prior work has largely neglected i…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • augmented reality
  • sound awareness
  • sound visualization
  • situational awareness
  • co-design
  • participatory design
  • wearable technology

• AudioWiz: Nearly Real-Time Audio Transcriptions

  Samuel White (2010) — Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This student research paper presents AudioWiz, a mobile application that provides near-real-time transcriptions of both spoken words and environmental sounds for deaf and hard of hearing users. The author identifies a critical gap in existing automat…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • audio transcription
  • crowdsourcing
  • human computation
  • environmental sounds
  • sound awareness
  • mobile accessibility

• SoundWatch: Exploring Smartwatch-based Deep Learning Approaches to Support Sound Awareness for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

  Dhruv Jain, Hung Ngo, Pratyush Patel, Steven Goodman, Leah Findlater, Jon Froehlich (2020) — Proceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '20)

  This paper presents SoundWatch, a smartwatch-based sound awareness system that uses deep learning to classify environmental sounds in real time and provide visual and haptic notifications to deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users. The research addresse…

  • deaf accessibility
  • hard of hearing
  • sound awareness
  • deep learning
  • wearable technology
  • smartwatch
  • machine learning
  • sound classification

• AdaptiveSound: An Interactive Feedback-Loop System to Improve Sound Recognition for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

  Hang Do, Quan Dang, Jeremy Zhengqi Huang, Dhruv Jain (2023) — ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper introduces AdaptiveSound, the first feedback-loop sound recognition system designed for deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users. Sound recognition tools help DHH people become aware of environmental sounds ranging from safety-critical alerts …

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • sound recognition
  • human-in-the-loop
  • machine learning
  • incremental learning
  • sound awareness
  • personalization
  • mobile accessibility

• SoundNarratives: Rich Auditory Scene Descriptions to Support Deaf and Hard of Hearing People

  Liang-Yuan Wu, Dhruv Jain (2025) — ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

  This paper introduces SoundNarratives, a real-time system that generates rich, contextual auditory scene descriptions tailored to deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users. Existing sound recognition technologies typically classify sounds into predefined …

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • sound awareness
  • generative AI
  • audio-language models
  • prompt engineering
  • situational awareness
  • auditory scene analysis

• Fairness Issues in AI Systems that Augment Sensory Abilities

  Leah Findlater, Steven Goodman, Yuhang Zhao, Shiri Azenkot, Margot Hanley (2020) — SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing

  This paper examines the unique fairness challenges that arise when AI systems are used to augment sensory abilities for people with disabilities — a context distinct from other AI applications because these systems provide information that is already…

  • AI fairness
  • sensory augmentation
  • visual impairment
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • privacy
  • object recognition
  • sound awareness
  • algorithmic bias
  • ethics