Literature Reviews

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

• Corridor-Walker: Mobile Indoor Walking Assistance for Blind People to Avoid Obstacles and Recognize Intersections

  Masaki Kuribayashi, Seita Kayukawa, Jayakorn Vongkulbhisal, Chieko Asakawa, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Shigeo Morishima (2022) — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 6, MHCI, Article 179)

  Walking an indoor corridor independently is deceptively hard for a blind traveller. Two problems compound: avoiding obstacles stacked against the wall (the same wall the traveller uses as a tactile guide) and recognising when an intersection has arri…

  • indoor navigation
  • blind navigation
  • obstacle avoidance
  • intersection detection
  • LiDAR
  • orientation and mobility
  • visual impairment
  • smartphone assistive technology
  • wayfinding
  • spatialized audio
  • vibration feedback

• Making VRML Accessible for People with Disabilities

  Sandy Ressler, Qiming Wang (1998) — Proceedings of the Third International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '98)

  This paper from researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) presents a taxonomy of techniques for making Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) environments accessible to people with disabilities. Written at a time when…

  • virtual reality
  • VRML
  • virtual environments
  • audio feedback
  • spatialized audio
  • keyboard navigation
  • speech input
  • navigational aids
  • text descriptions

• READ: A (Research) Platform for Evaluating Non-visual Access Methods to Digital Documents

  Laurent Sorin, Julie Lemarié, Mustapha Mojahid (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  READ (Documents Architecture REstitution) is a configurable research platform for evaluating alternative methods of non-visual access to digital documents. The system addresses a well-documented problem: despite extensive functionality, screen reader…

  • document accessibility
  • research platform
  • non-visual access
  • screen readers
  • text-to-speech
  • multimodal
  • auditory interface
  • spatialized audio
  • research tools

• Direct or Immersive? Comparing Smartphone-based Museum Guide Systems for Blind Visitors

  Xiyue Wang, Seita Kayukawa, Hironobu Takagi, Giorgia Masoero, Chieko Asakawa (2024) — Proceedings of the 21st International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents the first direct comparison of two smartphone-based museum guide paradigms for blind visitors: a "direct" system using turn-by-turn navigation with VoiceOver-controlled audio descriptions, and an "immersive" system using spatializ…

  • museum accessibility
  • blindness
  • indoor navigation
  • spatialized audio
  • screen readers
  • tactile exhibits
  • audio description
  • assistive technology