Research Initiatives and Impact

CREATE advances its mission — to make technology accessible and make the world accessible through technology — by supporting research that addresses accessibility needs in the disability community. Our research benefits from the varied expertise of faculty and students from the iSchool, Mechanical Engineering, Rehabilitation Medicine, Human-Centered Design, Disability Studies, Computer Science, and more.

Values-driven research

We focus on enabling people with disabilities to be part of the creation process, giving people with disabilities the education, voice, inspiration, and opportunity to enter and move through their education and into professional settings. This inclusive approach helps realize the disability mantra “nothing about us without us” as we pursue our ultimate goal: creating an inclusive and accessible world.

Disability-led

ArtInSight mobile phone app scans a child's artwork and provides a description.

Guided by the principle ‘nothing about us without us,’ recent work includes studies of neurodiverse users of GAI; use of captions by multilingual people with disabilities; and blind and low-vision people interacting with digital and tangible media.

For all ages

Collage of two images: one of a toddler-age child in a ride-on toy; the other of a 60 year-old man having his hair brushed by a robot.

Work to improve agency for people with disabilities at all life stages: On-time mobility for children with disabilities; independence for elders through robotics; shared experience of artwork in mixed visual abilities families.

Multiple perspectives

At a CREATE research showcase Ph.D. student Aashaka Desai, a petite brown woman wearing a mask and gesturing with her hands explains her 'Toward Language Justice' research poster for a tall man in a business suit.

Studies look at how families with disabled children navigate support systems that may not allow for cultural diversity and whether AI can support speech-language pathologists to deliver equitable care to culturally and linguistically diverse children with disabilities.

Engaged stakeholders

Representatives from one of CREATE's community partners participate in Community Day. The two women are viewing a presentation on a laptop surrounded by research posters and participants.

This year we forged new relationships with several regional and national disability-focused organizations. Twenty-two partnerships (and growing) connect our researchers with a wider, more diverse array of communities.

Energetic production and leadership

CREATE’s high-impact research in accessible technology and experiences included an emphasis on AI. Active AI research projects are addressing ableism, communication tools, health and activities of daily living, physical spaces and fabrication, digital accessibility and visualization, and interaction support.

CREATE and I-LABS completed their joint
investigation into early childhood mobility aids and
their effects on children’s neurological development
and have begun publishing their results.

54 Papers

published by CREATE faculty, students, and postdocs in the 2024-25 academic year.

Research impact

CREATE research on bias in GAI resume ranking was cited by publications including Forbes Magazine and The Wall Street Journal and by prominent policy organizations American Printing House for the Blind and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
CREATE researchers were invited by Zoom and Caption with Intention to consult about
possible improvements to videoconferencing and caption accessibility.
CREATE consulted on the UN Development Programme’s 2025 Human Development
Report about advancing human development for people with disabilities. The final report
cites recent CREATE research as well as earlier research by CREATE researchers about
disability studies perspectives on assistive technologies.

Recent research accolades

Associate Director Jacob O. Wobbrock and Ph.D. alum/Advisory Board member Shaun Kane‘s paper, “Freedom to Roam,” was honored with a 10-year Lasting Impact Award at the ACM SIGACCESS Conference (ASSETS ’25).
Associate Director James Fogarty was elected to the SIGCHI Academy in 2025 in recognition of his achievements in HCI research. Fogarty’s accessibility research includes a study of app accessibility cited by the Department of Justice and research on runtime repair of mobile app accessibility features that informed Apple’s pixel-based Screen Recognition.
CREATE faculty Amy J. Ko, Professor in the iSchool, was recognized as a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2024.

Conference Awards

CREATE had another strong showing at this year’s CHI, RESNA, ASSETS, and MobileHCI conferences — with faculty and Ph.D.s winning 8 awards and honorable mentions for their papers and demos.

Highlights of CREATE’s high-impact research

AI and Machine Learning Research

AI has enormous potential to support needs and ways of being for people with disabilities. CREATE researchers are thoughtfully exploring AI’s implications for people with disabilities so they are included in the development and use of AI products and so they are protected from AI biases. Active research projects are addressing ableism, communication tools, health and activities of daily living, physical spaces and fabrication, digital accessibility and visualization, and interaction support.

More about AI and Machine Learning Research at CREATE

Early Access and the Brain

How do early experiences with mobility technology impact brain development and learning outcomes? CREATE is partnering with UW I-LABS to answer this and other questions. This joint work will demonstrate that early access to mobility technology is a critical asset for development and learning and also contributes to CREATE’s goal of understanding and addressing historical perceptions of disability and assistive technology, which often serve to perpetuate exclusion despite legislation protecting individuals’ rights to mobility and technology.

Ongoing collaborations with Go Baby Go and HuskyAdapt are providing early childhood access to accessibility tools.

More about Early Access and the Brain Research at CREATE

Mobile Device and Desktop Accessibility

Mobile apps have become a key feature of everyday life, with apps for banking, work, entertainment, communication, transportation, and education, to name a few. But many apps remain inaccessible to people with disabilities who use screen readers or other assistive technologies. CREATE is working to support automated diagnosis and repair of mobile app accessibility failures for all mobile apps. CREATE faculty are also exploring other aspects of mobile app accessibility, such as creating better touch screens based on how people with disabilities actually interact.

Collected at scale accessibility data from 312 apps over 16 months
Conducted qualitative accessibility evaluation of 30 popular Android educational games

100,000 Downloads

of Pointing Magnifier, a desktop pointing aid that makes the mouse easier to use for people with limited fine motor function

Mobility, Indoors and Outdoors

Mobility is a precursor to community living and engagement and is a critical equity issue. Two projects have been deployed in cities around the world:

Project Sidewalk uses deep learning and crowdsourcing to identify inaccessible sidewalks. Toward that effort, the team is developing scalable data collection methods to acquire sidewalk accessibility information via crowdsourcing, computer vision, and online map imagery. The data will be used to design, develop, and evaluate a novel set of navigation and map tools for accessibility.

Open Sidewalks seeks to make pedestrian ways, like sidewalks, first-class members of an open, routable transportation network. By collecting a connected network of path types with detailed attributes like width, surface composition, steepness, and shared traffic, Open Sidewalks provides routing directions personalized to the user’s unique disability needs.

Public Engaged!

21 cities working to improve pedestrian access

1 million sidewalk labels provided by users

More than 10 mapathons in the past year

Physical Computing for Accessibility

Physical computing, the combination of consumer-grade fabrication and computing technology, enables participation for people with disabilities in multiple home and community contexts. Now widely available, physical computing technology includes 3D-modeling software and machines such as laser cutters, 3D-printers, knitting machines and programmable embroidery machines. These technologies are already making a demonstrable and significant impact on community living and participation for people with disabilities in the form of 3D-printed tactile maps, customized tactile interactions on devices, specialized tools for creating assistive technology.

Through a NIDILRR ARRT on Physical Computing in Community Living and Participation grant, we are training postdoctoral fellows to be leaders in rehabilitation research who can harness advances in physical computing and fabrication to enhance community living and participation with people
with disabilities.

Race, Disability & Technology

CREATE’s cross-campus Race, Disability, and Technology (RDT) initiative was established to support emerging research. In collaboration with six campus partners, the initiative awarded three RDT minigrants in 2023-24:

Professor Amy Ko for work on an accessible programming language
Ph.D. student Aashaka Desai for work on multilingual captioning
Ph.D. student Aaleyah Lewis for work examining the experiences of Black people with disabilities who use accessibility technologies.

Access, Equity and Inclusion

CREATE’s work includes efforts to improve data equity. Examples include our commentary on disability bias in biometrics; an autoethnographic study to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility; and development of a blocks-based language accessible to students with disabilities.

Research Showcases

Each year, CREATE research showcases bring industry and community partners together with faculty and student researchers to discuss CREATE-led and CREATE-funded work.

Learn More

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