Literature Reviews

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

• 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

• Loudmouth: Modifying Text-to-Speech Synthesis in Noise

  Rupal Patel, Michael Everett, Eldar Sadikov (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This short paper from Northeastern University presents Loudmouth, a modified text-to-speech synthesizer that emulates the Lombard effect — the natural way humans adjust their speech in noisy environments — to improve synthesized speech intelligibilit…

  • text-to-speech
  • speech synthesis
  • AAC
  • Lombard effect
  • speech intelligibility
  • noise
  • prosody
  • assistive technology

• On the Intelligibility of Fast Synthesized Speech for Individuals with Early-Onset Blindness

  Amanda Stent, Ann Syrdal, Taniya Mishra (2011) — Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2011)

  This paper reports on a pilot experiment comparing the intelligibility of fast synthesized speech across different text-to-speech (TTS) systems for individuals with early-onset blindness (onset before age seven). People who are blind increasingly use…

  • text-to-speech
  • screen readers
  • blindness
  • speech technology
  • speech intelligibility
  • assistive technology

• Perspectives on Speech and Language Interaction for Daily Assistive Technology: Introduction to Part 1 of the Special Issue

  Heidi Christensen, Frank Rudzicz, François Portet, Jan Alexandersson (2015) — ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This editorial introduces the first part of a TACCESS special issue on speech and language interaction for daily assistive technology, emerging from the 2013 SLPAT (Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies) workshop. The editors fram…

  • speech recognition
  • disordered speech
  • dysarthria
  • speech intelligibility
  • assistive technology
  • automatic speech recognition
  • clinical assessment
  • speech pathology
  • natural language processing

• Towards More Robust Speech Interactions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users

  Raymond Fok, Harmanpreet Kaur, Skanda Palani, Martez E. Mott, Walter S. Lasecki (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This University of Michigan study addresses a largely overlooked accessibility gap: while much research has focused on providing deaf users access to spoken output (via captioning or sign language), almost no work has addressed improving deaf users' …

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf speech
  • crowdsourcing
  • speech intelligibility
  • voice interface
  • human computation
  • smart speaker

• Voice Telephony for Individuals with Hearing Loss: The Effects of Audio Bandwidth, Bit Rate and Packet Loss

  Linda Kozma-Spytek, Paula Tucker, Christian Vogler (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents three experiments conducted over three years with a total of 114 individuals with hearing loss (68 cochlear implant users and 46 hearing aid users) and 12 hearing controls, investigating how audio quality parameters in telecommuni…

  • hearing loss
  • telecommunications
  • cochlear implant
  • hearing aid
  • audio quality
  • VoIP
  • wideband audio
  • speech intelligibility
  • accessibility standards