The literature-review database. Every paper Bob has reviewed (he has read many more), with a short summary, key findings, and tags. Browse, filter, search.
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
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Richard E. Ladner · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This paper introduces Accessmonkey, a JavaScript-based scripting framework that enables web users, developers, and researchers to collaboratively improve web accessibility through client-side page modifications. Built as an extension of the Greasemonkey Firefox extension…
web accessibility · web transcoding · browser extensions · JavaScript · collaborative accessibility
Shaun K. Kane, Jessie A. Shulman, Timothy J. Shockley, Richard E. Ladner · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This paper from the University of Washington presents a comprehensive multi-method accessibility evaluation of the home pages of the top 100 international universities as ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement 2006 World University Rankings. The study combined four…
web accessibility · education · accessibility testing · WCAG compliance · automated testing
Christopher Power, Helen Petrie · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This paper from the University of York evaluates the accessibility of Apple's iWeb, a non-professional web authoring tool representative of a new generation of Web 2.0 design applications aimed at non-technical users creating personal websites, blogs, and photo albums. The…
web accessibility · authoring tools · WCAG compliance · Web 2.0 · semantic HTML
Brian Kelly, David Sloan, Stephen Brown, Jane Seale, Helen Petrie, Patrick Lauke, Simon Ball · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This influential paper by a multi-institutional UK team argues that the WAI's predominantly technology-focused approach to web accessibility is counter-productive, and proposes "Accessibility 2.0" — a user-focused, contextual, pluralistic alternative that prioritizes people,…
web accessibility · accessibility policy · WCAG · contextual accessibility · e-learning
Sébastien Rainville-Pitt, Jean-Marie D'Amour · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This demonstration paper presents Edimaster Plus, a content management system developed over five years by Netic Hypermedia Inc. in Quebec, Canada, designed from the ground up to generate fully accessible websites meeting all three WAI priority levels. The paper addresses a…
web accessibility · content management systems · authoring tools · WCAG compliance · assistive technology
Cynthia C. Shelly, George Young · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This detailed technical paper from Microsoft provides practical design and coding techniques for making Dynamic HTML and AJAX applications accessible using the browser and assistive technology capabilities available in 2007 — deliberately without relying on the then-in-progress…
web accessibility · DHTML · AJAX · JavaScript · keyboard accessibility
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
Peter Thiessen, Charles Chen · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This paper presents ReefChat, an accessible Ajax chat application, and Fire Vox, an open-source screen reader extension for Firefox, as a proof-of-concept for WAI-ARIA live regions — one of the earliest practical demonstrations of this then-nascent specification. The authors…
ARIA · live regions · web accessibility · AJAX · Web 2.0
Yui-Liang Chen, Yung-Yu Ho · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This short paper examines the accessibility of Wretch Blog (wretch.cc), one of the most popular blogging platforms in Taiwan, when used with "Big Eye," a Chinese-language screen reader. The authors find that most core functionality of the blog works for visually impaired users —…
web accessibility · screen readers · blind users · blogging · multilingual accessibility
Yevgen Borodin, Jalal Mahmud, I. V. Ramakrishnan, Amanda Stent · 2007 · Proceedings of the 2007 International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A)
This paper presents the original HearSay non-visual web browser (version 1/2), developed at Stony Brook University in collaboration with the Helen Keller Services for the Blind. HearSay is a free, open-source, cross-platform browser written in Java that uses Mozilla for web…
non-visual web browser · screen readers · blind users · web accessibility · natural language processing
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
Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2007 · Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2007)
This paper presents a machine learning classifier that can automatically judge whether alternative text assigned to web images is appropriate or inappropriate, using contextual features rather than visual analysis of the image itself. The research addresses a persistent web…
alternative text · web accessibility · machine learning · screen readers · automated testing
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Craig M. Prince · 2007 · Assets '07: Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
This demonstration paper introduces WebAnywhere, a web-based, self-voicing screen reader that enables blind users to access the web from any computer with a standard browser and sound output, without needing to install specialized software. The paper addresses a fundamental…
screen readers · web accessibility · blind users · assistive technology · text-to-speech
Jeffrey P. Bigham, Anna C. Cavender, Jeremy T. Brudvik, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Richard E. Ladner · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)
This paper presents WebinSitu, a remote in situ study comparing the web browsing behavior of 10 blind and 10 sighted users over a one-week period. The study used an advanced web proxy built on UsaProxy that injected JavaScript into viewed pages to record not just HTTP requests…
web accessibility · blind users · screen readers · browsing behavior · user research
Daniel Keysers, Marius Renn, Thomas M. Breuel · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)
This paper from the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Technical University Kaiserslautern presents a system that automatically generates ALT tags for images on web pages by analysing image contents through a web proxy. The system addresses the…
automatic alt text · image accessibility · web accessibility · computer vision · image retrieval
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
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
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
Giorgio Brajnik, Andrea Mulas, Claudia Pitton · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)
Brajnik, Mulas, and Pitton's Assets '07 paper is a large, careful empirical investigation of the sampling step in web-accessibility evaluation — the step at which an evaluator picks which pages of a site to actually test. For any site above a trivial size, full coverage is…
web accessibility · accessibility evaluation · sampling methods · accessibility metrics · conformance testing
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
Aaron Andersen, Cyndi Rowland · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)
This poster paper from ASSETS 2007 reports on Phase I of a project to extend the WAVE (Web Accessibility Versatile Evaluator) open-source tool with a new suite of evaluators specifically targeting the cognitive load of web pages. The work, led by WebAIM and the National Center…
cognitive accessibility · cognitive disabilities · learning disabilities · cognitive load · evaluation tools
Jalal Mahmud · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '07)
This short ASSETS 2007 poster paper from Jalal Mahmud at Stony Brook University describes ongoing PhD research into reducing the information overload that blind users experience when completing multi-step web transactions — shopping, registrations, bill payments — using a screen…
screen readers · non-visual web access · web page segmentation · context analysis · web transactions
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
Giorgio Brajnik, Raffaella Lomuscio · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07)
Brajnik and Lomuscio argue that web accessibility cannot be managed without being measured, yet existing accessibility metrics are underdeveloped and almost universally tied to conformance with WCAG checkpoints rather than to the real-world barriers end users encounter. The…
web accessibility · accessibility metrics · accessibility evaluation · accessibility testing · conformance testing