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• Sasayaki: Augmented Voice Web Browsing Experience

  Daisuke Sato, Shaojian Zhu, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2011 · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)

  This paper introduces Sasayaki (Japanese for 'whisper'), a prototype that augments the standard screen-reader voice with a second, physically separated synthesised voice that whispers contextually relevant hints — for example 'entering main content', 'skipped the main', 'the…

  screen readers · auditory interface · voice browser · web accessibility · blindness and low vision

• WAI-ARIA live regions: eBuddy IM as a case example

  Peter Thiessen, Stephen Hockema · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents a practical case study of implementing WAI-ARIA live regions in eBuddy, a web-based instant messaging application with over 100 million users that aggregated popular IM networks into a single browser client. The paper addresses the fundamental challenge that…

  WAI-ARIA · live regions · screen readers · dynamic content · instant messaging

• Designing for Auditory Web Access: Accessibility and Cellphone Users

  Shari Trewin, Rachel Bellamy, John Thomas, Jonathan Brezin, John Richards, Cal Swart, Bonnie E. John · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper draws a parallel between two groups of web users who experience the web primarily through auditory rather than visual interaction: people with visual impairments using screen readers, and people in developing regions accessing the web through low-end mobile phones…

  auditory interaction · screen readers · mobile accessibility · developing regions · digital divide

• Audio Access to Calendars

  Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, Simon Harper · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper addresses a specific but widespread accessibility problem: pop-up calendar date pickers on the web are effectively unusable by people with visual impairments. These JavaScript widgets dynamically insert tabular calendar content into the page when a date field receives…

  visual impairment · screen readers · dynamic content · Web 2.0 · date picker

• WebAnywhere: Experiences with a New Delivery Model for Access Technology

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Wendy Chisholm, Richard E. Ladner · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This follow-up paper describes the evolution of WebAnywhere two years after its initial release, documenting how it expanded from a web-based screen reader for blind users into a broader platform for delivering access technology. Released publicly in June 2008, WebAnywhere…

  screen readers · blindness · low vision · web-based assistive technology · text-to-speech

• Interactive SIGHT into Information Graphics

  Seniz Demir, David Oliver, Edward Schwartz, Stephanie Elzer, Sandra Carberry, Kathleen F. McCoy · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents Interactive SIGHT (Summarizing Information GrapHics Textually), a system that provides visually impaired users with access to the high-level knowledge conveyed by bar charts in electronic documents. Unlike approaches that simply reproduce the graphic in…

  visual impairment · data visualization · natural language generation · graph accessibility · bar charts

• More than Meets the Eye: A Survey of Screen-Reader Browsing Strategies

  Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Glenn Dausch, I. V. Ramakrishnan · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This comprehensive survey catalogues the browsing strategies that experienced screen reader users develop to overcome the accessibility and usability barriers they encounter on the web. Drawing from multiple user studies, the authors document how blind users are far from passive…

  screen readers · blindness · browsing strategies · web navigation · usability

• Tailored presentation of dynamic content

  Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, Simon Harper · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents the SASWAT browser, a research prototype built as a self-voicing extension to Firefox (based on Fire Vox), designed to address a fundamental challenge of the Web 2.0 era: how should screen readers notify users about dynamic page updates? At the time of…

  screen readers · dynamic content · AJAX · Web 2.0 · eye tracking

• Social accessibility: the challenge of improving web accessibility through collaboration

  Daisuke Sato, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents Social Accessibility, a collaborative project from IBM Research Tokyo that enlists volunteers to fix web accessibility problems reported by visually impaired users. The system works through a three-step process: blind users encounter and report accessibility…

  crowdsourcing · screen readers · alternative text · visual impairment · social computing

• Modelling web navigation with the user in mind

  Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov, Max Göbel, Wolfgang Holzinger, Bernhard Krüpl, Andreas Mager, Robert Baumgartner · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper introduces the ABBA (Advanced Barrier-free Browser Accessibility) framework, a novel approach to screen reader design that replaces traditional sequential DOM-based navigation with a multi-axial navigation model. The core insight is that current screen readers force…

  screen readers · web navigation · visual impairment · semantic web · ontology

• TextSL: a screen reader accessible interface for second life

  Bugra Oktay, Eelke Folmer · 2010 · Proceedings of the 2010 International Cross Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents TextSL, a text-based command interface for Second Life that enables visually impaired users to explore and interact with the virtual world using a screen reader (JAWS). Inspired by multi-user dungeon (MUD) text adventure games like Zork — the predecessors of…

  virtual worlds · screen readers · visual impairment · blindness · text-based interface

• Exploratory Analysis of Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement

  Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Masatomo Kobayashi, Shinya Kawanaka, Chieko Asakawa · 2010 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental crowdsourced service from IBM Research-Tokyo that enables volunteers to fix web accessibility problems without requiring site owners to modify their pages. Launched in July 2008, the…

  crowdsourcing · web accessibility · social computing · metadata · screen readers

• Multimodal Presentation of Two-Dimensional Charts: An Investigation Using Open Office XML and Microsoft Excel

  Iyad Abu Doush, Enrico Pontelli, Tran Cao Son, Dominic Simon, Ou Ma · 2010 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper presents a comprehensive system for making Microsoft Excel charts accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired through multimodal haptic and audio feedback. The system extracts chart data from the OOXML format introduced in Excel 2007, then presents it…

  haptic feedback · data visualization · screen readers · multimodal interaction · force feedback

• Towards A Universally Usable Human Interaction Proof: Evaluation of Task Completion Strategies

  Graig Sauer, Jonathan Lazar, Harry Hochheiser, Jinjuan Feng · 2010 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing

  This paper addresses a critical accessibility barrier: CAPTCHAs and human-interaction proofs (HIPs) that effectively lock people with visual impairments out of web services. Prior research showed that blind users could only solve audio CAPTCHAs about 43-46% of the time, far…

  CAPTCHA · blind users · screen readers · universal usability · web security

• Accessibility by Demonstration: Enabling End Users to Guide Developers to Web Accessibility Solutions

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Jeremy T. Brudvik, Bernie Zhang · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper introduces Accessibility by Demonstration (ABD), a novel approach to accessibility evaluation that lets assistive technology users record the accessibility problems they encounter as shareable, replayable demonstrations and send them directly to web developers. ABD is…

  web accessibility · accessibility testing · screen readers · blind and low vision · accessibility evaluation

• FlashDOM: Interacting with Flash Content from the Document Object Model

  Kyle I. Murray · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper presents FlashDOM, a system that exposes Adobe Flash content to assistive technologies by translating Flash's internal structure and interactive elements into standard HTML Document Object Model (DOM) elements. The core problem addressed is that Flash Player's…

  screen readers · Adobe Flash · Document Object Model · web accessibility · assistive technology

• Interactive SIGHT Demo: Textual Summaries of Simple Bar Charts

  Seniz Demir, David Oliver, Edward Schwartz, Stephanie Elzer, Sandra Carberry, Kathleen F. McCoy · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This demonstration paper presents Interactive SIGHT, a browser extension designed to make simple bar charts found in online popular media (newspapers, magazines) accessible to people with visual impairments. The system goes beyond providing raw data values — it identifies the…

  information graphics · data visualization · blindness · screen readers · natural language generation

• Evaluating a Tool for Improving Accessibility to Charts and Graphs

  Leo Ferres, Gitte Lindgaard, Livia Sumegi · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper presents two formative usability studies of iGraph-Lite, a natural language-based assistive technology that enables blind and visually impaired people to interact with statistical line graphs through keyboard commands and text-to-speech output. The system comprises…

  data visualization · blindness · natural language generation · information graphics · screen readers

• Designing Auditory Cues to Enhance Spoken Mathematics for Visually Impaired Users

  Emma Murphy, Enda Bates, Dónal Fitzpatrick · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper presents a novel auditory math system designed to make spoken mathematical equations more accessible to visually impaired users. The core challenge addressed is that visual mathematical notation conveys structure — such as fractions, superscripts, subscripts, and…

  mathematical accessibility · auditory display · non-speech sound · spearcons · visual impairment

• Towards a Tool for Keystroke Level Modeling of Skilled Screen Reading

  Shari Trewin, Bonnie E. John, John Richards, Cal Swart, Jonathan Brezin, Rachel Bellamy, John Thomas · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This paper explores whether cognitive models of auditory interaction — specifically the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM) — can be adapted to predict task completion times for skilled screen reader users, with the goal of helping designers evaluate the usability of their interfaces…

  screen readers · cognitive modeling · usability · keyboard navigation · JAWS

• Audio Presentation of Auto-Suggest Lists

  Andy Brown, Caroline Jay, Simon Harper · 2009 · Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper investigates how to make auto-suggest lists (ASLs) — the dropdown suggestions that appear as users type in search boxes and form fields — accessible through audio for visually impaired users. Part of the SASWAT (Structured Accessibility Stream for Web 2.0 Access…

  visual impairment · screen readers · dynamic content · Web 2.0 · auto-suggest

• TeleWeb: accessible service for web browsing via phone

  Yevgen Borodin, Glenn Dausch, I. V. Ramakrishnan · 2009 · Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibililty (W4A)

  This paper presents TeleWeb, a telephony service that enables web browsing via any standard telephone using speech and keypad input. Built on top of the HearSay non-visual web browser engine from Stony Brook University, TeleWeb allows users to call a phone number and then search…

  screen readers · voice interface · visual impairment · blindness · telephony

• Combining SADIe and AxsJAX to Improve the Accessibility of Web Content

  Darren Lunn, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer · 2009 · Proceedings of the 2009 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the University of Manchester presents a prototype system that combines two accessibility approaches — SADIe and Google's AxsJAX framework — to improve web content access for visually impaired screen reader users. SADIe (Semantic Annotation for Document Interfaces…

  screen readers · web accessibility · transcoding · ARIA · CSS

• Evaluating Existing Audio CAPTCHAs and an Interface Optimized for Non-Visual Use

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Anna C. Cavender · 2009 · Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2009)

  This paper presents the first large-scale evaluation of audio CAPTCHAs — the purportedly accessible alternative to visual CAPTCHAs — revealing that they are dramatically more difficult for both blind and sighted users. The study gathered 10 types of audio CAPTCHAs from major…

  blind and low vision · web accessibility · screen readers · CAPTCHA · authentication

• Trailblazer: Enabling Blind Users to Blaze Trails Through the Web

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Tessa Lau, Jeffrey Nichols · 2009 · IUI '09: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces

  This paper introduces TrailBlazer, a system designed to help blind web users complete tasks more efficiently by providing step-by-step guidance through web pages. The core problem it addresses is that blind users relying on screen readers must often perform time-consuming linear…

  screen readers · blind users · web accessibility · non-visual interfaces · programming by demonstration