“What’s going on in Accessibility Research?” Frequencies and Trends of Disability Categories and Research Domains in Publications at ASSETS

Abstract

ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) is considered one of the premium forums for research on accessibility. Recently, Mack et al. shed light on the demographics, goals, research methodologies, and evolution of accessibility research over time. We extend their work by exploring the frequencies and trends of disability categories and computer science research domains in publications at ASSETS (N=1,678). Our results show that disability categories and research domains varied significantly across the publication years. We found that in the past 10 years, publications targeting Mental-Health-Related disabilities and the research domain of AR/VR show an increasing trend. In opposition, Gaming, Input Methods/Interaction Techniques, and User Interfaces domains portray a decreasing trend. Additionally, our results show that the majority of the publications utilize the AI/ML/CV/NLP domain (19%) and focus on people with visual disabilities (42%). We share our preliminary exploration results and identify avenues for future work.