Literature Reviews
Reviewed research papers, articles, and publications relevant to digital accessibility.
41 results found tagged spatial audio.
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SocialCue: Exploring the Design Space of Social Wayfinding Assistants for Blind and Low Vision People
SocialCue is a wearable technology probe that targets a problem most assistive navigation work ignores: not where to walk, but how to read and act inside an unfolding social scene. The authors argue that existing tools for blind and low vision (BLV) …
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Sonic Stage: Automatically Generating an Interactive Spatial Soundscape to Facilitate Dialogue Video Comprehension for Blind and Low Vision Viewers
Xu and colleagues (HKUST, Columbia, Aalto, Rochester) tackle a well-known but largely unsolved problem in video accessibility: standard audio description (AD) is constrained not to overlap with dialogue, so dialogue-heavy scenes in films and TV - whe…
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SoundSpace: What and Where Through Sound
SoundSpace is a real-time sensory substitution system designed to give blind and visually impaired users simultaneous awareness of what objects are present in a scene and where they are located, without relying exclusively on verbal scene description…
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Get In Touch with Your Seat: Accessible Seat Localization for Blind and Low Vision Travelers in Autonomous Shuttles
Fink, Brown, Movalia, and colleagues (University of Maine VEMI Lab, Grand Valley State University, and General Motors Global Research and Development) tackle a segment of the autonomous-vehicle accessibility problem that has received little attention…
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When Audio Is Enough: Design-Tradeoffs in Multi-Story MR Navigation
This CHI '26 exploratory study asks when an augmented-reality navigation aid can rely on audio alone. The authors argue that visual-first MR interfaces impose extra cognitive load and attention tunneling in high-stakes, cognitively demanding settings…
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Beyond Descriptions: A Generative Scene2Audio Framework for Blind and Low-Vision Users to Experience Vista Landscapes
Scene description apps (Seeing AI, Be My AI, Envision) do a reasonable job of telling blind and low-vision (BLV) users what is in front of them, but they are built for utility - 'there is a chair'. They fail at the aesthetic, leisure, emotional exper…
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From Selfie Stick to Virtual Cane: Enabling Blind Exploration through Mobile Virtual Reality
Consumer VR is a visual-first medium, which in practice shuts out blind and low-vision (BLV) users. Tang and colleagues argue that existing accessible VR systems do help BLV users explore virtual environments (VEs), but they depend on head-mounted di…
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Three Modalities, Two Design Probes, One Prototype, and No Vision: Experience-Based Co-Design of a Multi-modal 3D Data Visualization Tool
Kamath et al. report an Experience-Based Co-Design (EBCD) process in which five blind or low-vision (BLV) researchers and one sighted collaborator built a web-native, multimodal prototype for exploring 3D surface plots - a class of visualisation cent…
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Linux Screen Reader: Extensible Assistive Technology
This paper presents the Linux Screen Reader (LSR), an open source project from IBM that aimed to create a reusable, extensible development platform for building alternative and supplemental user interfaces on the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike con…
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Designing Auditory Displays to Facilitate Object Localization in Virtual Haptic 3D Environments
This paper investigates five different auditory display designs to help blind users locate objects in a virtual haptic 3D environment explored with a PHANToM Desktop haptic device. While haptic devices give visually impaired users the ability to expl…