A Review of 25 Years of Human-Computer Interaction Research on Reading Support Technologies for People with Disabilities Published in the ACM Digital Library
Oliver Alonzo, Saad Hassan · 2025 · ASSETS 2025: 27th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility · doi:10.1145/3663547.3746355
Summary
This systematic literature review analyzes 101 HCI publications from ACM venues spanning 2000 to 2024 that focus on reading support technologies for people with disabilities. The authors developed a comprehensive coding rubric covering publication metadata, contribution types, communities of focus, research methods, technologies proposed, metrics used, AI involvement, and participant information. The review addresses four research questions: which disability communities have been the primary focus, what research methods and contribution types dominate, what technologies and reading aspects have been explored, and what open questions remain. The corpus was drawn exclusively from ACM Digital Library publications, selected through systematic keyword searches covering disability-specific and reading-related terms. The authors conducted both descriptive statistical analysis across the full corpus and detailed community-specific analyses of individual publications. The review identifies that dyslexia was the most studied community (28 papers, 27.72%), followed by blind or low vision users (18, 17.82%), intellectual and cognitive disabilities (18, 17.82%), and deaf or hard of hearing users (16, 15.84%). Less-studied communities included people with ADHD, aphasia, alexia, autism, low literacy, and neurodivergent individuals, each with fewer than five publications. The top publication venues were ASSETS (29 papers), CHI (13), and W4A (9). The work is significant as the first cross-community systematic review of reading support technologies in HCI, providing a comprehensive map of where the field has been and where it needs to go.
Key findings
The review reveals several important patterns and gaps. Most primary contributions were artifacts (45 papers, 44.55%) accompanied by short-term lab-based evaluations, with very limited use of participatory design (only 3 studies) or longitudinal methods (1 study). Common technologies included visual augmentations, text modifications, and text simplification, primarily targeting readability, comprehension, and reading speed improvements. Web was the dominant platform (38 papers, 37.62%), with minimal exploration of mobile, e-reader, or printed text contexts. AI was present in only 17 papers (16.83%), though this is expected to grow rapidly with LLM advances. Community-specific findings showed distinct patterns: BLV research focused on skimming, navigation, and braille literacy development; DHH research emphasized text augmentation with sign language and simplification; dyslexia research concentrated on visual presentation modifications (fonts, colors, spacing) with less attention to content-level support; and intellectual/cognitive disability research explored summarization, simplified text, and multimodal approaches. Participant reporting was inconsistent — gender was reported in less than half of studies, literacy levels in only 10.89%, and median sample size was just 15. The review also found that technologies and reading aspects differed significantly across communities, suggesting that cross-community technology transfer could yield benefits — for example, skimming tools developed for BLV users might also help DHH readers.
Relevance
This review provides an essential roadmap for accessibility researchers and practitioners working on reading support. The identification of underserved communities — particularly people with aphasia, ADHD, autism, and low literacy — highlights urgent gaps where future work is needed. The finding that participatory methods were almost entirely absent from this research space is a significant concern, given the disability community's emphasis on "nothing about us without us." For practitioners, the review's technology landscape reveals that most reading support tools focus on web content, missing opportunities for mobile, printed text, and e-reader contexts that are increasingly important. The open research questions posed for each community provide concrete starting points for future work. A key limitation is the restriction to ACM venues, which may miss relevant work from other fields. The review also preceded the generative AI explosion, meaning the landscape is likely shifting rapidly as LLM-powered tools enter this space.
Tags: systematic literature review · reading support · reading disability · dyslexia · blind or low vision · deaf or hard of hearing · intellectual disability · cognitive disability · text simplification · readability · reading comprehension · braille literacy · assistive technology · web accessibility
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