Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

  The ACM Web4All Conference (W4A) is the premier venue for research focused on web accessibility. It brings together a diverse community committed to making the web inclusive for users of all abilities and backgrounds. This year, the 22nd International Web for All Conference (W4A 2025) was held at the ICC Sydney: International Convention & Exhibition Centre in Sydney, Australia, from April 28–29, 2025. In this blog post, I highlight my work titled “ AccessMenu: Enhancing Usability of Online Restaurant Menus for Screen Reader Users ,” which addresses the accessibility challenges faced by blind and visually impaired (BVI) users when navigating image-based restaurant menus online. Figure 1 Venkatraman et al.: (A) A sample restaurant menu in its original visual form. (B) The output produced by JAWS Convenient OCR when applied to the menu. (C) The AccessMenu interface, where the red box highlights the natural language query field, the yellow box marks the voice-input button, and...

  The ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) serves as the leading global platform for showcasing innovative research in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). It convenes researchers, practitioners, and industry leaders to discuss cutting-edge advancements in designing, evaluating, and utilizing technology to improve human experiences. CHI 2024 , themed "Surfing the World," took place from May 11 to 16, 2024, at the Hawaiʻi Convention Center in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, USA, with provisions for remote participation.  In this blog post, I highlight a compelling recent work presented at the conference, titled " GazePrompt: Enhancing Low Vision People’s Reading Experience with Gaze-Aware Augmentations ," authored by Ru Wang et al . Figure 1 Wang et al. : GazePrompt offers two primary features: Line-Switching (LS) support and Difficult-Word (DW) support. Each feature includes two design options: (a) Line Highlighting and (b) Arrow for LS support, and (c) Text-...

The eighth ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval ( #CHIIR2023 ) was held online in Austin, Texas, from March 19 to 23. After three years of virtual conferences, CHIIR 2023 switched to an in-person and online hybrid format. We ( Bhanuka , Mohan , Dr. Vikas Ashok , and Dr. Sampath Jayarathna ) presented our demonstration titled " DisETrac: Distributed Eye-Tracking for Online Collaboration " in person in Texas. Today I'm excited to join my first in-person conference since the start of my Ph.D. @ACM_CHIIR #CHIIIR2023 pic.twitter.com/8Y8nfR0EKs — Bhanuka Mahanama (@mahanama94) March 20, 2023 CHIIR is a well-established multi-and interdisciplinary conference with a research community engaged in human-computer interaction, information retrieval, information behavior, and human-information interaction. The full and perspective paper submissions of CHIIR 2023 comprised 26 accepted publications with an acceptance rate of 39.4%, presented over...