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• ASL-STEM Forum: Enabling Sign Language to Grow Through Online Collaboration

  Anna C. Cavender, Daniel S. Otero, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Richard E. Ladner · 2010 · CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

  This paper presents the ASL-STEM Forum, the first online video-based collaboration tool designed to help expand American Sign Language (ASL) vocabulary for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. The paper addresses a significant educational barrier: ASL…

  American Sign Language · deaf education · STEM accessibility · online collaboration · video forums

• AudioWiz: Nearly Real-Time Audio Transcriptions

  Samuel White · 2010 · Proceedings of the 12th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2010)

  This student research paper presents AudioWiz, a mobile application that provides near-real-time transcriptions of both spoken words and environmental sounds for deaf and hard of hearing users. The author identifies a critical gap in existing automated transcription systems:…

  deaf and hard of hearing · audio transcription · crowdsourcing · human computation · environmental sounds

• 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 authors conducted a field study…

  user-generated content · social media · ATAG · authoring tools · crowdsourcing

• Better Vocabularies for Assistive Communication Aids: Connecting Terms Using Semantic Networks and Untrained Annotators

  Sonya Nikolova, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Christiane Fellbaum, Perry Cook · 2009 · Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper presents the design and evaluation of ViVA (Visual Vocabulary for Aphasia), an assistive communication tool that uses semantic networks to help people with aphasia find words more easily. The authors address a fundamental problem with existing AAC devices: their…

  aphasia · assistive communication · semantic networks · visual vocabularies · adaptive tools

• Collaborative Web Accessibility Improvement: Challenges and Possibilities

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Daisuke Sato, Chieko Asakawa · 2009 · Proceedings of the 11th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '09)

  This paper reports on the Social Accessibility Project, an experimental service developed by IBM Research in Tokyo that uses collaborative metadata authoring to improve web accessibility. The system works through a three-part architecture: end users (primarily screen reader…

  web accessibility · collaborative accessibility · crowdsourcing · metadata · screen readers

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Repository for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2009 · ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Summer 2009

  This short SIGWEB Newsletter article proposes Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared federated repository for externally authored web-accessibility metadata. The authors argue that accessibility cannot scale as long as fixes depend on the original site owner inlining alt text,…

  web accessibility · metadata · semantic transcoding · social accessibility · crowdsourcing

• An Accessibility Evaluation Platform: Borrowing from Web 2.0

  Yui-Liang Chen, Gina Lin · 2008 · Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper proposes a community-driven Accessibility Evaluation Platform for Taiwan, drawing on Web 2.0 principles to supplement the government-led accessibility compliance program administered by the Research, Development & Evaluation Commission (RDEC). At the time of writing,…

  accessibility evaluation · web 2.0 · crowdsourcing · community review · Taiwan

• Towards One World Web with HearSay3

  Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Amanda Stent, I. V. Ramakrishnan · 2008 · Proceedings of the 2008 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This short paper presents HearSay 3, a self-voicing non-visual web browser developed at Stony Brook University and the University of Washington, designed to address accessibility challenges introduced by Web 2.0. Building on two previous versions — the original HearSay that…

  screen readers · non-visual web browser · blind users · collaborative accessibility · multilingual accessibility

• Accessibility Commons: A Metadata Infrastructure for Web Accessibility

  Shinya Kawanaka, Yevgen Borodin, Jeffrey P. Bigham, Darren Lunn, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This paper introduces Accessibility Commons (AC), a shared metadata infrastructure designed to integrate, store, and share accessibility metadata produced by diverse research projects, assistive technologies, and individual users. The authors identify a core problem: numerous…

  web accessibility · metadata · assistive technology · screen readers · social accessibility

• 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

• Social Accessibility: Achieving Accessibility through Collaborative Metadata Authoring

  Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Takashi Itoh, Chieko Asakawa · 2008 · Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '08)

  This IBM Research Tokyo paper proposes Social Accessibility, a system that applies social computing principles to web accessibility by enabling a worldwide community of volunteers to collaboratively create external accessibility metadata for inaccessible websites. The core…

  web accessibility · social computing · collaborative authoring · metadata · web transcoding

• Accessmonkey: Enabling and Sharing End User Accessibility Improvements

  Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2007 · SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing

  This paper proposes the Accessmonkey Framework, a collaborative platform for creating, sharing, and applying user-generated web accessibility improvements. The system addresses the reality that blind users frequently encounter inaccessible web content — information encoded…

  web accessibility · screen reader · browser extension · crowdsourcing · user scripting

• Feedback-based evaluation tool for web accessibility

  Daisuke Asai, Masahiro Watanabe, Yoko Asano · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)

  This short Assets '07 demonstration paper from NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories proposes a feedback-driven approach to improving automated web-accessibility evaluation tools. The authors frame the familiar problem that automated checkers such as Bobby only catch a fraction of…

  web accessibility · automated testing · accessibility evaluation · crowdsourcing · WCAG

• A Semantic-Web Based Framework for Developing Applications to Improve Accessibility in the WWW

  Christos Kouroupetroglou, Michail Salampasis, Athanasios Manitsaris · 2006 · Proceedings of the 2006 International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility (W4A)

  This paper presents a Semantic Web application framework designed to improve web accessibility by adding a metadata annotation layer on top of existing web pages. The framework addresses a core problem for blind users: screen readers serialize web pages linearly, stripping away…

  semantic web · ontology · web annotation · blind users · voice browser

• WebInSight: Making Web Images Accessible

  Jeffrey P. Bigham, Ryan S. Kaminsky, Richard E. Ladner, Oscar M. Danielsson, Gordon L. Hempton · 2006 · Proceedings of the 8th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '06)

  This paper introduces WebInSight, a system that automatically generates and inserts alternative text for web images that lack it. The authors first establish the scale of the problem through a series of web studies examining five groups of important websites: the 500 most…

  web accessibility · alternative text · image accessibility · OCR · optical character recognition

• Annotation-Based Transcoding for Nonvisual Web Access

  Chieko Asakawa, Hironobu Takagi · 2000 · Proceedings of the Fourth International ACM Conference on Assistive Technologies (Assets '00)

  This companion paper to the same authors' transcoding proxy paper (also at Assets '00) provides a detailed technical description of the annotation-based component of their IBM Japan transcoding system. The core problem addressed is that modern web pages are designed with visual…

  web accessibility · screen reader · transcoding · non-visual access · blindness and low vision