Literature Reviews

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

• Collaborative AI Scaffolding for Structured Drawing in Dementia Care: A Feasibility Study

  Hui-Lien Huang, I-Ping Chen (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26)

  This CHI 2026 Extended Abstract reports a one-on-one feasibility study of a tablet-based AI drawing tool for older adults with dementia, conducted at a day-care centre in Taiwan. The system pairs a Google Gemini vision-language model (VLM) with Azure…

  • dementia
  • older adults
  • human-AI collaboration
  • human-in-the-loop
  • vision-language model
  • text-to-speech
  • art therapy
  • cognitive accessibility
  • feasibility study

• Mapping Movies: A Mind-Map Approach to Aphasia-Friendly Video

  Shayan Bali, Alexandre Nevsky, Filip Bircanin, Timothy Neate (2026) — Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '26)

  Bali, Nevsky, Bircanin, and Neate (King's College London) target an under-served corner of media accessibility: viewers with aphasia and other complex communication needs (CCNs) for whom subtitles, audio description, and existing simplified-media int…

  • aphasia
  • complex communication needs
  • video accessibility
  • cognitive accessibility
  • mind maps
  • artificial intelligence
  • media accessibility
  • text-to-speech
  • visualisation

• Cognitively Motivated Features for Readability Assessment

  Lijun Feng, Noémie Elhadad, Matt Huenerfauth (2009) — Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2009)

  Feng, Elhadad, and Huenerfauth (2009) develop and evaluate an automatic readability-assessment tool targeted specifically at adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) — people in the 'mild' category (IQ 55-70), who comprise roughly 3% of the U.S. po…

  • readability
  • automatic readability assessment
  • cognitive accessibility
  • intellectual disability
  • mild intellectual disability
  • text simplification
  • plain language
  • entity density
  • lexical chains
  • working memory
  • discourse features
  • Flesch-Kincaid
  • reading level
  • reading comprehension
  • user study
  • natural language processing
  • named entity recognition
  • computational linguistics
  • text-to-speech
  • literacy
  • Weekly Reader corpus
  • cognitively motivated features

• User Interface of a Nonvisual Table Navigation Method

  Chieko Asakawa, Takashi Itoh (1999) — CHI '99 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This two-page CHI '99 late-breaking-results extended abstract addresses a problem that was central to the early accessible web: HTML tables were everywhere — used both for tabular data and, at the time, as a layout device — but talking web browsers r…

  • web accessibility
  • screen readers
  • voice browser
  • table accessibility
  • blindness and low vision
  • non-visual interaction
  • assistive technology
  • text-to-speech

• SIBYLLE: a system for alternative communication adapting to the context and its user

  Tonio Wandmacher, Jean-Yves Antoine, Franck Poirier (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This paper describes the latest version of SIBYLLE, an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system developed at the Université François Rabelais and the Université Européenne de Bretagne for users with severe motor and speech impairments …

  • augmentative and alternative communication
  • AAC
  • word prediction
  • virtual keyboard
  • single switch
  • scanning
  • latent semantic analysis
  • language model
  • keystroke saving rate
  • text-to-speech
  • locked-in syndrome
  • cerebral palsy
  • rehabilitation
  • multilingual accessibility
  • natural language processing

• Accessible spaces: navigating through a marked environment with a camera phone

  Kee-Yip Chan, Roberto Manduchi, James Coughlan (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from UC Santa Cruz and the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute describes a camera-phone-based wayfinding system for blind travellers. The core idea is to deploy small, cheap, pie-shaped colour markers in …

  • wayfinding
  • navigation
  • blindness
  • visual impairment
  • computer vision
  • camera phone
  • orientation and mobility
  • assistive technology
  • text-to-speech
  • fiducial markers

• Dual Educational Electronic Textbooks: The Starlight Platform

  Dimitris Grammenos, Anthony Savidis, Yannis Georgalis, Themistoklis Bourdenas, Constantine Stephanidis (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper from the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Crete, Greece presents Starlight, a software platform for creating and reading multimodal interactive electronic textbooks that provide a Dual User Interface — an interface …

  • accessible publishing
  • electronic textbook
  • blind students
  • inclusive education
  • dual user interface
  • braille display
  • text-to-speech
  • non-visual interaction
  • multimodal interaction
  • earcons
  • educational technology

• EasyVoice: Integrating Voice Synthesis with Skype

  Paulo A. Condado, Fernando G. Lobo (2007) — Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This paper presents EasyVoice, a system developed at the University of Algarve that integrates text-to-speech synthesis with Skype to enable people with voice disabilities to have real-time phone conversations. The core insight is that while TTS syst…

  • voice disabilities
  • text-to-speech
  • VoIP
  • augmentative communication
  • virtual keyboard
  • cerebral palsy
  • scanning input
  • word completion

• Introduction to the Talking Points Project

  Scott Gifford, Jim Knox, Jonathan James, Atul Prakash (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper introduces the Talking Points project from the University of Michigan, a system that attaches digital information to physical places and objects using passive RFID tags, creating an accessible "augmented reality" for blind and visually imp…

  • visual impairment
  • RFID
  • wayfinding
  • location awareness
  • ubiquitous computing
  • augmented reality
  • universal design
  • text-to-speech

• VoxBoox: A System for Automatic Generation of Interactive Talking Books

  Aanchal Jain, Gopal Gupta (2006) — Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This poster paper from the University of Texas at Dallas presents VoxBoox, a system that automatically converts HTML-coded digital books into interactive talking books accessible via telephone. The system works by translating HTML pages into VoiceXML…

  • talking books
  • VoiceXML
  • aural navigation
  • visual impairment
  • blind users
  • HTML transformation
  • text-to-speech
  • accessible publishing