I don’t know of an archived, peer-reviewed list anywhere, but my colleague Richard Ladner has a nice slide deck he uses when lecturing about accessibility in history. I’ve adapted his deck and placed it on Google Slides.
Here’s the list in the deck:
- Telephones (“devising methods of exhibiting the vibrations of sound optically, for use in teaching the deaf and dumb.”, Alexander Graham Bell)
- Texting (Began as TTY for transmitting text over phone lines, evolved into SMS on cell phone lines.)
- Modems (Robert H. Weitbrecht (deaf), invented modem to optimize TTY communication)
- Machine vision (Motivated by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which helped convert printed materials into machine readable text.)
- Speech synthesis (Motivated by need for people without sight to read text.)
- Speech recognition (Motivated by need for people without sight to enter text without hands.)
- Captioning (First enabled deaf viewers to read audio.)
- Screen readers (Allow non-visual access to computers. Motivated by Section 508 accessible technology requirements.)
That’s probably not complete, and the sources aren’t fully verified, but it’s a good place to start investigating the history.