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• Find and Seek: Assessing the Impact of Table Navigation on Information Look-up with a Screen Reader

  Kristin Williams, Taylor Clarke, Steve Gardiner, John Zimmerman, Anthony Tomasic · 2019 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS)

  This paper challenges the widely held assumption that HTML tables are inherently inaccessible to screen reader users. Web designers use visual cues like layout, typography, and spatial grouping to help sighted users navigate and understand page content, but screen readers…

  screen readers · web accessibility · table navigation · spatial layout · cognitive load

• Making the Blockly Library Accessible via Touchscreen

  Logan B. Caraco, Sebastian Deibel, Yufan Ma, Lauren R. Milne · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper presents two prototype designs for making Google's Blockly library — the foundation underlying popular block-based programming environments (BBPEs) like Scratch, MIT App Inventor, and the Code.org curriculum — accessible to users with visual impairments…

  visual impairment · block-based programming · education · screen readers · ARIA

• X-Ray: Screenshot Accessibility via Embedded Metadata

  Sujeath Pareddy, Anhong Guo, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper introduces X-Ray, a system that preserves the accessibility of user interface content when it is captured as a screenshot. Screenshots strip away all semantic information — text structure, element roles, states, labels, and navigation order — leaving only pixels that…

  screen readers · alternative text · screenshots · image accessibility · metadata

• The Design Space of Nonvisual Word Completion

  Hugo Nicolau, Andre Rodrigues, Andre Santos, Tiago Guerreiro, Kyle Montague, Joao Guerreiro · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents the first design space for nonvisual word completion on mobile devices, addressing a gap where word completion interfaces — ubiquitous in sighted mobile typing — remain poorly designed for screen reader users. While sighted users can glance at three…

  blindness · text entry · mobile accessibility · screen readers · word prediction

• Disability, ICT and eLearning Platforms: Faculty-Facing Embedded Work Tools in Learning Management Systems

  Sushil K. Oswal · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of the accessibility of the Canvas learning management system (LMS) for faculty with visual disabilities. What makes this study distinctive is its focus on the faculty-facing interface — nearly all prior research…

  learning management systems · higher education · screen readers · visual impairment · faculty accessibility

• GoDonnie: A Robot Programming Language to Improve Orientation and Mobility Skills in People Who are Visually Impaired

  Juliana Damasio Oliveira, Márcia de Borba Campos, Alexandre Amory, Rafael H. Bordini · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper presents GoDonnie, a text-based programming language designed to help people who are visually impaired (PVI) develop both computational thinking and orientation and mobility (O&M) skills simultaneously. GoDonnie is based on Logo, the classic educational…

  orientation and mobility · visual impairment · programming education · robotics · screen readers

• Non-Visual Beats: Redesigning the Groove Pizza

  William Payne, Alex Xu, Amy Hurst, S. Alex Ruthmann · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper describes the accessible redesign of the Groove Pizza, a popular free web-based drum step-sequencer developed by NYU’s Music Experience Design Lab (MusEDLab) that reaches thousands of users per month. The original Groove Pizza uses a circular visual…

  music accessibility · blind · visual impairment · screen readers · sonification

• 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) — to examine how these…

  voice assistant · blind · visual impairment · conversational user interfaces · design guidelines

• Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Usable and Secure Audio reCAPTCHA

  Mohit Jain, Rohun Tripathi, Ishita Bhansali, Pratyush Kumar · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents reCAPGen, a system that automatically generates usable and secure audio CAPTCHAs by leveraging the gap between human and machine speech recognition abilities. Visual CAPTCHAs — the dominant form of online human verification — are inherently inaccessible to…

  CAPTCHA · audio accessibility · blind · visual impairment · web accessibility

• Demo: Expanding Blocks4All with Variables and Functions

  Jacqueline Shao Yi Ong, Nana Adwoa O. Amoah, Alison E. Garrett-Engele, Mariella Irene Page, Katherine R. McCarthy, Lauren R. Milne · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This demonstration paper describes extensions to Blocks4All, an accessible blocks-based programming environment (BBPE) for iPad designed to enable children with visual impairments to learn programming through touchscreen interaction with screen reader support. Traditional BBPEs…

  programming education · blind · low vision · visual impairment · screen readers

• DarkReader: Bridging the Gap Between Perception and Reality of Power Consumption in Smartphones for Blind Users

  Jian Xu, Syed Masum Billah, Roy Shilkrot, Aruna Balasubramanian · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents DarkReader, a modified Android screen reader that truly turns off the smartphone screen while preserving full touchscreen interaction for blind users, saving 24-52% of power compared to the default TalkBack screen reader. The work addresses two problems blind…

  blind · screen readers · TalkBack · VoiceOver · Android

• Making Memes Accessible

  Cole Gleason, Amy Pavel, Xingyu Liu, Patrick Carrington, Lydia B. Chilton, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2019 · Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2019)

  This paper presents two semi-automatic methods for making internet image macro memes accessible to people with vision impairments: rich alternative text descriptions and audio macro memes. Memes are a pervasive form of online communication, yet they are almost entirely…

  alternative text · blind · low vision · social media · image accessibility

• 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 technologies. An online survey of 53…

  screen readers · voice assistant · blind · web search · information retrieval

• A Proposal to Adapt the Semiotic Inspection Method to Analyze Screen Reader Mediated Interaction

  Lucas Pedroso Carvalho, Raquel Oliveira Prates, André Pimenta Freire · 2019 · Proceedings of the 18th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems (IHC 2019)

  This paper proposes SIM-SR (Semiotic Inspection Method for Screen Reader mediated interaction), an adaptation of the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM) from Semiotic Engineering theory to evaluate how screen readers mediate the communication between designers and visually impaired…

  semiotic engineering · screen readers · communicability · blind users · low vision

• "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 collected over five days in June…

  alternative text · social media accessibility · image accessibility · blindness · screen readers

• Parallel DOM Architecture for Accessible Interactive Simulations

  Taliesin L. Smith, Jesse Greenberg, Sam Reid, Emily B. Moore · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This paper presents the Parallel DOM (PDOM) architecture developed by the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder to make their suite of 140+ free science and mathematics simulations accessible to students with visual impairments. PhET sims are…

  web accessibility · interactive simulations · screen readers · keyboard accessibility · WAI-ARIA

• 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) and face-to-face interviews…

  smart home · blind · visual impairment · Internet of Things · independent living

• Improving Usability of Math Editors

  Neil Soiffer · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper presents an empirical analysis of mathematical symbol usage across US grade 6-12 textbooks to demonstrate that context-aware math editors could dramatically reduce the number of buttons needed for symbol entry, significantly improving usability for screen reader…

  mathematics accessibility · STEM accessibility · MathML · equation editors · screen readers

• Arabic web accessibility guidelines: Understanding and use by web developers in Kuwait

  Muhammad Saleem · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This extended abstract describes a doctoral research project aimed at developing and implementing Arabic-language web accessibility resources for developers, web content managers, and designers in Kuwait and the broader Middle East. The paper highlights a significant gap: while…

  web accessibility · Arabic · Kuwait · Middle East · WCAG

• Accessify: An ML Powered Application to Provide Accessible Images on Web Sites

  Shivam Singh, Anurag Bhandari, Nishith Pathak · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This demonstration paper presents Accessify, a browser plugin that uses machine learning to automatically generate alternative text descriptions for all images on a website, injecting them into the page’s DOM so screen readers can access them. The system addresses the persistent…

  alternative text · image accessibility · machine learning · browser extension · computer vision

• Automatic Role Detection of Visual Elements of Web Pages for Automatic Accessibility Evaluation

  Carlos Duarte, Ana Salvado, M. Elgin Akpinar, Yeliz Yeşilada, Luís Carriço · 2018 · Proceedings of the 15th International Web for All Conference (W4A 2018)

  This short paper presents an approach to automatically detect the visual roles of web page elements — specifically menus and lists — to enable automated accessibility evaluation tools to assess WCAG techniques that require understanding an element’s semantic role, not just its…

  automated testing · web accessibility · WCAG · web page segmentation · navigation

• Assistive Debugging to Support Accessible LaTeX Based Document Authoring

  Ahtsham Manzoor, Murayyiam Parvez, Suleman Shahid, Asim Karim · 2018 · Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This demonstration paper presents ALAP (Accessible LaTeX-based Authoring and Presentation), an open-source extension to the TeXlipse Eclipse plugin that makes LaTeX document authoring more accessible for blind researchers and writers. LaTeX is widely used for scientific and…

  mathematical accessibility · LaTeX · blind and low vision · text-to-speech · document authoring

• Design and Evaluation of a Multimodal Science Simulation

  Brianna J. Tomlinson, Prakriti Kaini, Siyan Zhou, Taliesin L. Smith, Emily B. Moore, Bruce N. Walker · 2018 · Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This demonstration paper presents a multimodal version of PhET's John Travoltage interactive physics simulation, designed to support learners with and without visual impairments in exploring static electricity concepts. The key design goal was creating a single simulation with…

  STEM accessibility · sonification · multimodal interface · visual impairment · science education

• Examining Image-Based Button Labeling for Accessibility in Android Apps through Large-Scale Analysis

  Anne Spencer Ross, Xiaoyi Zhang, James Fogarty, Jacob O. Wobbrock · 2018 · Proceedings of the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '18)

  This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of mobile app accessibility, focusing specifically on label-based accessibility barriers in image-based buttons across 5,753 free Android apps. The researchers analyzed three classes of interactive image-based buttons —…

  mobile accessibility · Android · screen readers · image labeling · large-scale analysis

• Working Together: Technology as the Foundation for Better Employment Outcomes for People with Disability

  Alastair McEwin · 2017 · Proceedings of the 14th International Web for All Conference (W4A)

  Written by Australia's Disability Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission, this keynote paper draws on the findings of the 2016 "Willing to Work" national inquiry into employment discrimination against older Australians and Australians with…

  disability employment · disability rights · workplace accessibility · digital inclusion · disability discrimination