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• PhotoTacs: An Image-Based Cell Phone Interface

  Michael J. Astrauskas · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents PhotoTacs, a simplified image-based cell phone interface designed to help people with cognitive or visual impairments navigate their phone contacts and make calls. The author begins by identifying the core problem: as cellular phones gained features, their…

  cognitive accessibility · mobile accessibility · assistive technology · visual impairment · user interface design

• A user evaluation of the SADIe transcoder

  Darren Lunn, Sean Bechhofer, Simon Harper · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a user evaluation of SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a system that uses Semantic Web technologies to make web pages more accessible to screen reader users. The core problem SADIe addresses is that web pages convey…

  web accessibility · screen readers · semantic web · transcoding · visual impairment

• PowerUp: An Accessible Virtual World

  Shari Trewin, Vicki L. Hanson, Mark R. Laff, Anna Cavender · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper describes the design and validation of accessibility features for PowerUp, an IBM-developed multiplayer 3D virtual world educational game aimed at middle school students. The researchers were tasked with making the game usable by players with visual, hearing,…

  game accessibility · virtual reality · visual impairment · blindness · cognitive accessibility

• A Camera Phone Based Currency Reader for the Visually Impaired

  Xu Liu · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a camera phone-based system for identifying U.S. paper currency denominations for people who are blind or visually impaired. The work addresses a specific accessibility gap: unlike currencies in many other countries, U.S. paper bills are identical in size and…

  visual impairment · computer vision · assistive technology · mobile accessibility · object recognition

• Tactile Chart Generation Tool

  Cagatay Goncu, Kim Marriott · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents a Java application that automatically generates tactile bar and pie charts from raw data values provided in a formatted text file. Developed in collaboration with Vision Australia, the tool addresses the time-consuming and expensive process of manually…

  tactile graphics · data visualization · visual impairment · braille · accessible publishing

• RouteCheckr: Personalized Multicriteria Routing for Mobility Impaired Pedestrians

  Thorsten Völkel, Gerhard Weber · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents RouteCheckr, a client/server system for personalised pedestrian navigation that calculates routes optimised for multiple criteria relevant to mobility impaired users. The authors identify three key shortcomings of existing navigation systems: map data…

  navigation · wayfinding · wheelchair accessibility · visual impairment · mobility

• Investigating Sighted Users' Browsing Behaviour to Assist Web Accessibility

  Eleni Michailidou, Simon Harper, Sean Bechhofer · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper presents an eye tracking study investigating how sighted users browse web pages, with the goal of using these insights to improve web accessibility for visually impaired users. The core argument is that understanding sighted users' visual browsing patterns can inform…

  eye tracking · web accessibility · visual impairment · web design · visual complexity

• Advanced Auditory Menus: Design and Evaluation of Auditory Scroll Bars

  Pavani Yalla, Bruce N. Walker · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper from the Sonification Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology investigates how to design auditory scrollbars — non-speech sound cues that convey contextual information (menu size, current position) while navigating auditory menus. Visual menus use scrollbars, icons,…

  auditory interface · auditory menu · sonification · non-speech sounds · universal design

• A Demonstration of PhotoTacs: A Simple Image-Based Phone Dialing Interface for People with Cognitive or Visual Impairments

  Michael J. Astrauskas, John A. Black Jr, Sethuraman Panchanathan · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper from Arizona State University's Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing demonstrates PhotoTacs, an image-based phone book application for smart phones designed for people with cognitive disabilities, visual impairments, or illiteracy. The motivation is that modern…

  cognitive accessibility · visual impairment · mobile accessibility · simplified interface · assistive technology

• Blind Hero: Enabling Guitar Hero for the Visually Impaired

  Bei Yuan, Eelke Folmer · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper from the University of Nevada, Reno presents Blind Hero, a modification of the popular video game Guitar Hero that replaces visual stimuli with haptic feedback to enable visually impaired players to participate. The system uses a custom haptic glove with small pager…

  game accessibility · haptic feedback · visual impairment · sensory substitution · rhythm game

• Web 2.0: Hype or Happiness?

  Mary Zajicek · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This keynote paper by Mary Zajicek of Oxford Brookes University takes a deliberately broad, holistic view of Web 2.0 accessibility, arguing that physical access to web content is only the starting point. Zajicek defines accessibility along three dimensions: the ability to access…

  Web 2.0 · digital inclusion · older adults · visual impairment · digital divide

• Mathematics on the Web: Emerging Opportunities for Visually Impaired People

  Cristian Bernareggi, Dominique Archambault · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from the @Science European thematic network surveys the state of the art in making mathematical content on the web accessible to visually impaired people, arguing that MathML adoption is the key to unlocking accessibility. The authors explain a fundamental challenge:…

  mathematical accessibility · visual impairment · blind users · MathML · braille

• Accessible Image File Formats: The Need and the Way (Position Paper)

  Sandeep R. Patil · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This position paper from IBM India argues that existing WCAG guidelines for image accessibility (alt text, longdesc, image maps) are insufficient because they rely on voluntary compliance by content authors and cannot address scenarios where images are the primary content — such…

  image accessibility · alternative text · screen readers · blind users · visual impairment

• (Natural Language) Interaction with Graphical Representations of Statistical Data

  Leo Ferres, Petro Verkhogliad, Louis Boucher · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper from Carleton University and Statistics Canada presents iGraph-Lite, a system that makes statistical graphs published in "The Daily" (Statistics Canada's main dissemination publication) accessible to blind and visually impaired users through natural language…

  data visualization · blind users · visual impairment · natural language processing · web accessibility

• Automatic accessibility transcoding for flash content

  Daisuke Sato, Hisashi Miyashita, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This 2007 paper from IBM's Tokyo Research Laboratory tackles a problem that was acute during the height of the Flash era: the near-total inaccessibility of Flash content to screen reader users. Although Flash had an accessibility framework built on Microsoft Active Accessibility…

  flash · transcoding · automatic repair · screen readers · alternative text

• aiBrowser for multimedia: introducing multimedia content accessibility for visually impaired users

  Hisashi Miyashita, Daisuke Sato, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  A companion paper to Sato et al.'s Flash-transcoding work, this 2007 paper from the same IBM Tokyo Research Lab team introduces aiBrowser — an accessible web browser purpose-built for multimedia-heavy sites of the era (ABC News Video, YouTube, Disney). The authors identify two…

  multimedia · streaming media · flash · DHTML · rich internet applications

• 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 an environment — on walls,…

  wayfinding · navigation · blindness · visual impairment · computer vision

• Haptic comparison of size (relative magnitude) in blind and sighted people

  Sarah A. Douglas, Shasta Willson · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Douglas and Willson's Assets '07 paper is a controlled psychophysical study of how blind and sighted users compare relative magnitude using a PHANToM force-feedback device — the workhorse haptic input-output device of the era. The motivating problem is practical: accessibility…

  haptics · visual impairment · blindness · multimodal · psychophysics

• Semantic & syntactic context-aware text entry methods

  Jun Gong · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Jun Gong's Assets '07 demonstration paper proposes a context-aware extension to the dictionary-based predictive disambiguation (DBPD) text-entry methods — the family that included the once-ubiquitous T9 on mobile phone keypads. DBPD methods let users press each multi-letter key…

  text entry · motor impairment · visual impairment · predictive text · T9

• SADIe: exposing implicit information to improve accessibility

  Darren Lunn · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  Darren Lunn's Assets '07 demonstration paper introduces SADIe (Structural-Semantics for Accessibility and Device Independence), a transcoding system from the University of Manchester that uses Semantic Web ontologies to expose the implicit visual structure of web pages to screen…

  web accessibility · transcoding · semantic web · ontology · CSS

• Equipping designers by simulating the effects of visual and hearing impairments

  Joy Goodman-Deane, Patrick M. Langdon, P. John Clarkson, Nicholas H.M. Caldwell, Ahmed M. Sarhan · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre describes a software simulator built to help designers — especially product and communications designers, not just web designers — understand the effects of common vision and hearing…

  inclusive design · design tools · simulation · visual impairment · hearing impairment

• Developing usable CAPTCHAs for blind users

  Jonathan Holman, Jonathan Lazar, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, John D'Arcy · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  This short ASSETS 2007 poster from a Towson University team led by Jonathan Lazar — joined by Jonathan Holman, Jinjuan Heidi Feng, and John D'Arcy of Notre Dame — addresses the long-standing accessibility problem that text-based CAPTCHAs (the distorted-letter image puzzles used…

  CAPTCHA · audio CAPTCHA · blindness and low vision · screen readers · web accessibility

• Photonote evaluation: aiding students with disabilities in a lecture environment

  Gregory Hughes, Peter Robinson · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)

  Hughes and Robinson at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory present Photonote, a lecture-capture system designed specifically for students with disabilities, and a controlled user study comparing it to human note-takers. Where existing lecture-capture systems (eClass, Lecture…

  lecture capture · note-taking · educational accessibility · academic accommodation · sign language interpreter

• GraSSML: Accessible Smart Schematic Diagrams for All

  Z. Ben Fredj, D. A. Duce · 2006 · Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper addresses a persistent gap in web accessibility: making schematic diagrams (organizational charts, flowcharts, UML diagrams, etc.) accessible to people who cannot perceive visual representations. While previous approaches tried to work "bottom-up" — starting with a…

  accessible graphics · SVG · semantic web · diagram accessibility · alternative representations

• Dialog Generation for Voice Browsing

  Zan Sun, Amanda Stent, I. V. Ramakrishnan · 2006 · Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A): Building the Mobile Web: Rediscovering Accessibility?

  This paper presents HearSay, a voice browser system developed at Stony Brook University that provides speech-driven web access for people with visual disabilities. Unlike conventional screen readers that force users to arrow through a linearized, single-column presentation of…

  voice browsing · screen readers · visual impairment · web page segmentation · content summarization