Introduction to the Special Issue on ASSETS’19

We are pleased to present four articles that are extended versions of conference papers presented at the 20th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’19), which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA on October 28–30, 2019. Authors of several top papers from the conference submitted manuscripts for consideration, which underwent a full review process for ACM's Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS). The guest editors for this issue are Kristen Shinohara and Foad Hamidi.

This issue includes four articles that have been accepted to this special issue of TACCESS. Additional articles based on ASSETS’19 papers may appear in a future issue of TACCESS. The journal editors thank the authors for their excellent submissions, and we also thank all of the journal reviewers who contributed their time and expertise to this process. We would like to acknowledge the additional challenges that the global COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the writing and review process of the papers included in this issue. We wish to express our sincere appreciation and gratitude to the authors and reviewers for their patience and effort during this difficult time.

The first article, “ DOI: Effect of Sign-Recognition Performance on the Usability of Sign-Language Dictionary Search,” presents the results of three Wizard-of-Oz studies that investigate the relationship between the performance of sign-language recognition in ASL dictionary searches and user judgments of the system. This work provides insight into factors that impact user judgments in this context and presents metrics that better correlate with them.

The second article, “ DOI: Iterative Design of Sonification Techniques to Support People with Visual Impairments in Obstacle Avoidance,” demonstrates the effectiveness of WatchOut, a sonification technique envisioned via user-centered design to accurately map and convey obstacles. In this extended version of their paper, authors investigate a design mapping strategy that reports minimal, yet accurate obstacle information for improved usability.

The third article, “ DOI: Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Users Evaluating Designs for Highlighting Key Words in Educational Lecture Videos,” presents results from a study with Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) participants investigating how to highlight dynamic text used in video captions. In this paper, the authors use empirical data from their experimental study to offer guidance for how to format caption text for DHH users in the future.

The fourth article, “ DOI: Factors Affecting the Accessibility of Voice Telephony for People with Hearing Loss: Audio Encoding, Network Impairments, Video, and Environmental Noise,” investigates audio quality parameters for voice telephony, specifically analyzing narrowband vs wideband audio, encoding bit rates, and packet loss for mobile and VOIP networks. Results from this work are relevant to standards and policy considerations for future telecommunication system designs.

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