Search

We present SciA11y, a system that renders inaccessible scientific paper PDFs into HTML. SciA11y uses machine learning models to extract and understand the content of scientific PDFs, and reorganizes the resulting paper components into a form that better supports skimming and scanning for blind and low vision (BLV) readers. SciA11y adds navigation features such as tagged headings, a table of contents, and bidirectional links between inline citations and references, which allow readers to resolve citations without losing their context. A set of 1.5 million open access papers are processed and available at https://scia11y.org/. This system is a first step in addressing scientific PDF accessibility, and may significantly improve the experience of paper reading for BLV users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We undertake a system-level analysis of the conference peer review process. The process involves three constituencies with different objectives: authors want their papers accepted at prestigious venues (and quickly), conferences want to present a program with many high-quality and few low-quality papers, and reviewers want to avoid being overburdened by reviews. These objectives are far from aligned; the key obstacle is that the evaluation of the merits of a submission (both by the authors and the reviewers) is inherently noisy. Over the years, conferences have experimented with numerous policies and innovations to navigate the tradeoffs. These experiments include setting various bars for acceptance, varying the number of reviews per submission, requiring prior reviews to be included with resubmissions, and others. The purpose of the present work is to investigate, both analytically and using agent-based simulations, how well various policies work, and more importantly, why they do or do not work. We model the conference-author interactions as a Stackelberg game in which a prestigious conference commits to a threshold acceptance policy which will be applied to the (noisy) reviews of each submitted paper; the authors best-respond by submitting or not submitting to the conference, the alternative being a "sure accept" (such as arXiv or a lightly refereed venue). Our findings include: observing that the conference should typically set a higher acceptance threshold than the actual desired quality, which we call the resubmission gap and quantify in terms of various parameters; observing that the reviewing load is heavily driven by resubmissions of borderline papers --- therefore, a judicious choice of acceptance threshold may lead to fewer reviews while incurring an acceptable loss in quality; observing that depending on the paper quality distribution, stricter reviewing may lead to higher or lower acceptance rates --- the former is the result of self selection by the authors. As a rule of thumb, a relatively small number of reviews per paper, coupled with a strict acceptance policy, tends to do well in trading off these two objectives; finding that a relatively small increase in review quality or in self assessment by the authors is much more effective for conference quality control (without a large increase in review burden) than increases in the quantity of reviews per paper.; showing that keeping track of past reviews of papers can help reduce the review burden without a decrease in conference quality. For robustness, we consider different models of paper quality and learn some of the parameters from real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Figures in scientific publications contain important information and results, and alt text is needed for blind and low vision readers to engage with their content. We conduct a study to characterize the semantic content of alt text in HCI publications based on a framework introduced by Lundgard and Satyanarayan [30]. Our study focuses on alt text for graphs, charts, and plots extracted from HCI and accessibility publications; we focus on these communities due to the lack of alt text in papers published outside of these disciplines. We find that the capacity of author-written alt text to fulfill blind and low vision user needs is mixed; for example, only 50% of alt texts in our sample contain information about extrema or outliers, and only 31% contain information about major trends or comparisons conveyed by the graph. We release our collected dataset of author-written alt text, and outline possible ways that it can be used to develop tools and models to assist future authors in writing better alt text. Based on our findings, we also discuss recommendations that can be acted upon by publishers and authors to encourage inclusion of more types of semantic content in alt text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the aim of identifying good structures and examples for papers in the software engineering field, we conducted a study of the type of papers accepted along four decades in the Research Track of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). We used for this purpose a categorization scheme for Software Engineering papers that was obtained by merging, extending and revising a few existing paper scheme proposals. This paper summarizes some outcomes relative to what topics and problems are addressed, what types of contribution are presented and how they are validated. Insights from the study could help ICSE authors, reviewers and conference organizers in focusing and improving future efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital accessibility has become an important topic in the field of HCI, but when looking at accessibility on a global scale, we find that the representation of accessibility research is mostly centered in the Global North with countries that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Our paper explores digital accessibility in Iran, focusing exclusively on its national policies on accessibility. Iran is a non-WEIRD country located in the Global South, with no reports on its digital accessibility status from the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technologies (G3ict). We found that there is not enough focus on accessibility in Iran's regulations and we conclude our paper by recommending directions for improving this situation such as HCI and disability organizations in Iran cooperating with G3ict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-embodied agents can have both physical and virtual bodies, moving between real and virtual environments to meet user needs, embodying robots or virtual agents alike to support extended human-agent relationships. As a design paradigm, multi-embodiment offers potential benefits to improve communication and access to artificial agents, but there are still many unknowns in how to design these kinds of systems. This paper presents the results of a scoping review of the multi-embodiment research, aimed at consolidating the existing evidence and identifying knowledge gaps. Based on our review, we identify key research themes of: multi-embodied systems, identity design, human-agent interaction, environment and context, trust, and information and control. We also identify 16 key research challenges and 12 opportunities for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech-enabled smart speakers are common devices used for numerous tasks in everyday life. While speech-enabled technologies are widespread, using one's voice as a computing modality introduces new accessibility challenges for people with speech disfluencies such as stammering (also known as stuttering). This paper investigates the smart speaker user experiences of people who stammer over three weeks. We conducted diary studies and semi-structured interviews with 11 individuals to identify their daily routines, difficulties with successful interactions, and strategies to overcome these barriers. Our analysis demonstrates key factors such as device location, its affordances, and the structure of commands had a strong impact on user experience. Participants highlighted different linguistic strategies to try and overcome interaction difficulties and discussed the potential of using smart speakers for speech and language therapy. We emphasise the need to further understand the experiences of people who stammer in smart speaker design to increase their accessibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technologies for blind and low-vision (BLV) people have long been a focus of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and accessibility (ASSETS) research. To map and assess this cross-disciplinary field, prior literature reviews have focused on specific BLV research areas (e.g., navigation assistance) or study methodologies (e.g., qualitative methods). In this paper, we provide a more holistic examination, combining both quantitative bibliometric analyses with qualitative assessments. Using keyword queries of terms focused on the human (e.g., people) and their visual status (e.g., blind, low-vision), we first derived a dataset of 880 papers published between 2010-2022 from ACM and IEEE conferences and journals. We then apply a programmatic analysis of this dataset followed by a qualitative analysis of the 100 most-cited papers. Our findings highlight four major research areas: Accessibility at Home & on the Go, Non-Visual Interaction, Orientation & Mobility, and Education. We also capture the diversity of denominations used to refer to the BLV community and their co-occurrences, as well as computer systems targeting both blind and low-vision users with a focus on visual substitution. We close by suggesting areas for future work and hope to stimulate discussions in our field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we present Robots for Social Justice (R4SJ): a framework for an equitable engineering practice of Human-Robot Interaction, grounded in the Engineering for Social Justice (E4SJ) framework for Engineering Education and intended to complement existing frameworks for guiding equitable HRI research. To understand the new insights this framework could provide to the field of HRI, we analyze the past decade of papers published at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, and examine how well current HRI research aligns with the principles espoused in the E4SJ framework. Based on the gaps identified through this analysis, we make five concrete recommendations, and highlight key questions that can guide the introspection for engineers, designers, and researchers. We believe these considerations are a necessary step not only to ensure that our engineering education efforts encourage students to engage in equitable and societally beneficial engineering practices (the purpose of E4SJ), but also to ensure that the technical advances we present at conferences like HRI promise true advances to society, and not just to fellow researchers and engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness) can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socioeconomic impact. Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and methodological support throughout the development life cycle. This paper investigates to what extent top Software Engineering (SE) conferences and journals have included research on human values in SE. We investigate the prevalence of human values in recent (2015 - 2018) publications in these top venues. We classify these publications, based on their relevance to di erent values, against a widely used value structure adopted from the social sciences. Our results show that: (a) only a small proportion of the publications directly consider values, classified as directly relevant publications; (b) for the majority of the values, very few or no directly relevant publications were found; and (c) the prevalence of directly relevant publications was higher in SE conferences compared to SE journals. This paper shares these and other insights that may motivate future research on human values in software engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]