Literature Reviews

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

• CLARIS: Clear and Intelligible Speech from Whispered and Dysarthric Voices

  Neil Shah, Yash Sonkar, Shirish Subhash Karande, Vineet Gandhi (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper introduces CLARIS (Clear and Accessible Restoration of Impaired Speech), a compact end-to-end neural speech-to-speech restoration system designed to convert whispered speech and dysarthric speech into clear, natural, intelligible …

  • speech accessibility
  • dysarthria
  • voice conversion
  • whispered speech
  • silent speech
  • speech disorders
  • transfer learning
  • voice user interface
  • machine learning
  • AAC

• Comparing speaker-dependent and speaker-adaptive acoustic models for recognizing dysarthric speech

  Frank Rudzicz (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from Frank Rudzicz at the University of Toronto compares two strategies for building automatic speech recognition (ASR) acoustic models that work for people with dysarthria — a set of motor speech disorders that produces…

  • dysarthria
  • automatic speech recognition
  • acoustic model
  • speaker adaptation
  • hidden Markov model
  • phoneme
  • speech intelligibility
  • motor speech disorders
  • machine learning
  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • speech accessibility
  • voice interface

• Warping Time for More Effective Real-Time Crowdsourcing

  Walter S. Lasecki, Christopher D. Miller, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2013) — Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2013)

  This paper introduces TimeWarp, a technique that manipulates audio playback speed to improve crowd workers performance on real-time speech captioning. The core problem is that non-expert typists cannot keep up with natural speaking rates of 150-225 w…

  • real-time captioning
  • crowdsourcing
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • human computation
  • speech accessibility

• From User Perceptions to Technical Improvement: Enabling People Who Stutter to Better Use Speech Recognition

  Colin Lea, Zifang Huang, Jaya Narain, Lauren Tooley, Dianna Yee, Dung Tien Tran, Panayiotis Georgiou, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Leah Findlater (2023) — Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '23)

  This paper investigates how people who stutter (PWS) experience consumer speech recognition systems and demonstrates technical improvements that can significantly reduce errors. The work combines user research with engineering interventions across th…

  • stuttering
  • speech recognition
  • voice assistants
  • dictation
  • speech accessibility
  • dysfluency
  • automatic speech recognition
  • speech input

• Assessing Virtual Assistant Capabilities with Italian Dysarthric Speech

  Fabio Ballati, Fulvio Corno, Luigi De Russis (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This paper evaluates how well three major smartphone virtual assistants — Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana — can understand and respond to Italian dysarthric speech. Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder characterized by slurre…

  • speech recognition
  • dysarthria
  • virtual assistant
  • voice interface
  • ALS
  • speech accessibility
  • multilingual accessibility

• Development of a Real-time Bionic Voice Generation System based on Statistical Excitation Prediction

  Farzaneh Ahmadi, Kazuhiro Kobayashi, Tomoki Toda (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper presents the first real-time implementation of the Pneumatic Bionic Voice (PBV) system, a voice prosthesis for people who have undergone laryngectomy — surgical removal of the larynx, typically due to advanced throat cancer. …

  • voice prosthesis
  • laryngectomy
  • speech accessibility
  • voice conversion
  • assistive technology
  • bionics
  • signal processing