Literature Reviews

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

• I Can Do It: Exploring Voice Assistants for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

  Madhuka Nadeeshani, Jacqueline Johnstone, Kirsten Ellis, Swamy Ananthanarayan (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper reports an eight-week deployment of screen-based voice assistants (Google Nest Hub and Amazon Echo Show 8) with 17 adults with intellectual disabilities (ID) — including co-occurring autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, Rett …

  • voice assistant
  • intellectual disability
  • smart display
  • cognitive accessibility
  • qualitative research
  • speech recognition
  • peer support

• Challenges in Automatic Speech Recognition for Adults with Cognitive Impairment

  Michelle Cohn, Alyssa Lanzi, Yui Ishihara, Chen-Nee Chuah, Georgia Zellou, Alyssa Weakley (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This CHI 2026 paper quantifies how well state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) handles voice commands produced by older adults with cognitive impairment, and asks which acoustic features actually predict transcription accuracy. The autho…

  • automatic speech recognition
  • ASR
  • dementia
  • Alzheimer's disease
  • mild cognitive impairment
  • AgeTech
  • voice assistant
  • Amazon Alexa
  • Whisper
  • aging in place
  • ability-based design
  • acoustic analysis
  • word error rate
  • smart home
  • human-in-the-loop

• Deaf and Hard of Hearing Access to Intelligent Personal Assistants: Comparison of Voice-Based Options with an LLM-Powered Touch Interface

  Paige S DeVries, Michaela Okosi, Ming Li, Nora Dunphy, Gidey Gezae, Dante Conway, Abraham Glasser, Raja Kushalnagar, Christian Vogler (2026) — Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26)

  This mixed-methods study compares three input methods for Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) people who use their voice to interact with an Amazon Echo Show: (1) natural deaf-accented speech via Alexa's built-in ASR, (2) Wizard-of-Oz 'facilitated English…

  • deaf and hard of hearing
  • voice assistant
  • intelligent personal assistant
  • automatic speech recognition
  • deaf-accented speech
  • large language model
  • accessibility
  • smart home

• "Siri Talks at You": An Empirical Investigation of Voice-Activated Personal Assistant (VAPA) Usage by Individuals Who Are Blind

  Ali Abdolrahmani, Ravi Kuber, Stacy M. Branham (2018) — Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2018)

  This UMBC and UC Irvine study is one of the first to examine how individuals who are blind use voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) like Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home, and what barriers they encounter. The researchers interviewed 14 legal…

  • blindness
  • voice interface
  • voice assistant
  • Siri
  • Amazon Echo
  • Google Home
  • smart speaker
  • mobile accessibility
  • privacy
  • social acceptability

• Internet of Things (IoT) as Assistive Technology: Potential Applications in Tertiary Education

  Scott Hollier, Shadi Abou-Zahra (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper explores how consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices could serve as assistive technology for students with disabilities in tertiary education, based on qualitative interviews with five students representing hearing, mobility, print…

  • Internet of Things
  • assistive technology
  • higher education
  • W3C
  • voice assistant
  • captioning
  • smart speaker
  • interoperability
  • privacy
  • digital inclusion

• Home Automation for an Independent Living: Investigating the Needs of Visually Impaired People

  Barbara Leporini, Marina Buzzi (2018) — Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This paper investigates the habits, expectations, and unmet needs of visually impaired people regarding home automation and remote control systems through an online survey of 42 participants (32 totally blind, 10 low vision; ages 18-70+; 64.3% male) …

  • smart home
  • blind
  • visual impairment
  • Internet of Things
  • independent living
  • home automation
  • screen readers
  • voice assistant
  • user research
  • Italy

• VERSE: Bridging Screen Readers and Voice Assistants for Enhanced Eyes-Free Web Search

  Alexandra Vtyurina, Adam Fourney, Meredith Ringel Morris, Leah Findlater, Ryen W. White (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper identifies the complementary strengths and weaknesses of screen readers and voice assistants (VAs) for blind web searchers, then presents VERSE (Voice Exploration, Retrieval, and SEarch), a prototype that merges the best of both technologi…

  • screen readers
  • voice assistant
  • blind
  • web search
  • information retrieval
  • web accessibility
  • smart speaker
  • smartwatch
  • multimodal interaction
  • VoiceOver

• Reading Between the Guidelines: How Commercial Voice Assistant Guidelines Hinder Accessibility for Blind Users

  Stacy M. Branham, Antony Rishin Mukkath Roy (2019) — Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents a qualitative document review of public-facing voice assistant design guidelines published by five leading commercial vendors — Amazon (Alexa), Google (Google Assistant), Microsoft (Cortana), Apple (Siri), and Alibaba (Xiao AI) — …

  • voice assistant
  • blind
  • visual impairment
  • conversational user interfaces
  • design guidelines
  • Alexa
  • Siri
  • Google Assistant
  • screen readers
  • accessibility barriers