Literature Reviews

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

• "It's almost like they're trying to hide it": How User-Provided Image Descriptions Have Failed to Make Twitter Accessible

  Cole Gleason, Patrick Carrington, Cameron Cassidy, Meredith Ringel Morris, Kris M. Kitani, Jeffrey P. Bigham (2019) — The World Wide Web Conference

  This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of how Twitter's opt-in image description feature (launched in 2016) has affected the accessibility of images on the platform. The researchers analyzed 1.09 million tweets with images collecte…

  • alternative text
  • social media accessibility
  • image accessibility
  • blindness
  • screen readers
  • Twitter
  • user-generated content

• Prosumers and accessibility: how to ensure a productive interaction

  Yod Samuel Martín García, Beatriz San Miguel González, Juan Carlos Yelmo García (2009) — Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

  This paper examines how accessibility can be ensured in user-generated content (UGC) created by "prosumers" — ordinary web users who both consume and produce content but lack any training, awareness, or accountability regarding accessibility. The aut…

  • user-generated content
  • social media
  • ATAG
  • authoring tools
  • crowdsourcing
  • community accessibility
  • Web 2.0
  • content management systems

• (Voice) website creation and access using phones

  Arun Kumar, Sheetal K. Agarwal, Priyanka Manwani, Ketki Dhanesha (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This challenge paper from IBM Research India presents Spoken Web, a platform that enables people to create and access "voice websites" (VoiceSites) entirely through phone calls using speech and DTMF (touch-tone) input. The system takes a fundamentall…

  • voice interface
  • developing countries
  • digital divide
  • low literacy
  • user-generated content
  • mobile accessibility
  • multilingual access

• The Spoken Web Application Framework: User Generated Content and Service Creation through Low-End Mobiles

  Arun Kumar, Sheetal K. Agarwal, Priyanka Manwani (2010) — Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from IBM Research India presents the Spoken Web Application Framework (SWAF), a platform that expands the definition of "Web" itself to include voice-based hyperlinked content accessible through ordinary telephone calls. At the time of pub…

  • digital divide
  • voice interface
  • developing regions
  • digital inclusion
  • mobile accessibility
  • user-generated content
  • Global South accessibility
  • multilingual accessibility

• Empathic communication of accessibility barriers in web 2.0 editing

  Afra Pascual, Mireia Ribera, Toni Granollers (2015) — Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper presents EmpathicEditor4Accessibility (EE4A), a prototype web editor that helps non-technical content writers understand and fix accessibility errors by communicating barriers through the perspective of disabled personas rather than techni…

  • authoring tools
  • user-generated content
  • accessibility education
  • empathic design
  • WCAG compliance
  • content management systems
  • personas

• Authoring accessible media content on social networks

  Letícia Seixas Pereira, José Coelho, André Rodrigues, João Guerreiro, Tiago Guerreiro, Carlos Duarte (2022) — Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22)

  This paper investigates why user-generated visual content on social media remains overwhelmingly inaccessible to blind and visually impaired users, despite platforms offering tools to add alternative descriptions. The researchers conducted a two-phas…

  • social media accessibility
  • alt text
  • user-generated content
  • image descriptions
  • digital inclusion
  • content authoring

• Beyond Subtitles: Captioning and Visualizing Non-speech Sounds to Improve Accessibility of User-Generated Videos

  Oliver Alonzo, Hijung Valentina Shin, Dingzeyu Li (2022) — Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22)

  This paper investigates a significant gap in video captioning: the representation of non-speech sounds. While automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become widely available for generating captions on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Zoom, these sy…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • captioning
  • non-speech sounds
  • automatic captions
  • video accessibility
  • user-generated content
  • sound event detection
  • graphic captions

• AIDE: Automatic and Accessible Image Descriptions for Review Imagery in Online Retail

  Rachana Sreedhar, Nicole Tan, Jingyue Zhang, Kim Jin, Spencer Gregson, Eli Moreta-Feliz, Niveditha Samudrala, Shrenik Sadalgi (2022) — Proceedings of the 19th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  This paper from the Wayfair Next team presents AIDE (Automatic Image Description Engine), a multi-modal system that automatically generates alt-text for user-submitted review photos on e-commerce sites. While product images on retail sites sometimes …

  • alternative text
  • image description
  • online shopping
  • blindness and low vision
  • computer vision
  • natural language processing
  • user-generated content
  • e-commerce accessibility