Literature Reviews

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

• Toward Enhancing Subtitle Features in Mobile Apps: Analyzing User Reviews for Accessibility and Usability Insights

  Wajdi M Aljedaani, Matheus Souza, Marcelo Medeiros Eler (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This large-scale study analyses user reviews from the Google Play Store to understand how people experience subtitle and caption features in mobile applications. The authors extracted roughly 180 million reviews from the top 340 Android apps across d…

  • subtitles
  • captioning
  • mobile applications
  • user reviews
  • app store analysis
  • sentiment analysis
  • hearing impairments
  • customization
  • multilingual accessibility

• Online News Videos: The UX of Subtitle Position

  Michael Crabb, Rhianne Jones, Mike Armstrong, Chris J. Hughes (2015) — ASSETS '15: Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility

  This BBC-funded research investigates whether repositioning subtitles from their traditional placement within a video to below the video frame improves user experience for online news content. The study addresses a gap in captioning research: while t…

  • subtitles
  • captions
  • deaf accessibility
  • user experience
  • video accessibility
  • personalization
  • online media
  • web video
  • hearing impairment

• Accessibility for the HTML5 <video> element

  Silvia Pfeiffer, Conrad Parker (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

  This paper documents early efforts to standardize how subtitles, captions, and other accessibility data should be associated with the then-new HTML5 <video> element. Written in 2009 when Firefox, Opera, and Safari were just beginning to implement <vi…

  • video accessibility
  • HTML5
  • captioning
  • subtitles
  • web standards
  • timed text
  • open source
  • Ogg

• Responsive Design for Personalised Subtitles

  Chris J. Hughes, Mike Armstrong, Rhianne Jones, Michael Crabb (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from BBC R&D and the University of Dundee proposes applying responsive web design principles to subtitle display, moving away from the legacy Teletext format that has constrained subtitling since 1979. Traditional subtitles are pre-blocked…

  • subtitles
  • captions
  • responsive design
  • video accessibility
  • personalization
  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • web video
  • media accessibility

• I Wish You Could Make the Camera Stand Still: Envisioning Media Accessibility Interventions with People with Aphasia

  Alexandre Nevsky, Filip Bircanin, Madeline N. Cruice, Stephanie Wilson, Elena Simperl, Timothy Neate (2024) — Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024)

  This paper presents the first study aimed at envisioning accessibility interventions for audiovisual media specifically designed for people with aphasia — a language disorder typically caused by stroke that affects the production and comprehension of…

  • aphasia
  • audiovisual media
  • media accessibility
  • television accessibility
  • content personalisation
  • participatory design
  • envisioning
  • diegetic prototypes
  • complex communication needs
  • subtitles
  • content domestication