UW CREATE


March 18, 2024

Amy Ko named ACM Distinguished Member

March 18, 2024 Congratulations to CREATE faculty Amy J. Ko, who has been recognized as a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for her work on human-centered theories of program understanding and the development of tools and learning technologies.  “I’m honored to be recognized by my nominators, all of whom have been role models and mentors…


Empowering users with disabilities through customized interfaces for assistive robots 

March 15, 2024 For people with severe physical limitations such as quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate personal assistant robots could bring a life-enhancing level of independence and self-determination. Allen School Ph.D. candidate Vinitha Ranganeni and her advisor, CREATE faculty member Maya Cakmak, have been working to understand and meet the needs of users of assistive…


Zhang is CREATE’s Newest Apple AIML fellow

March 18, 2024 Congratulations to Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang – the most recent CREATE Ph.D. student to receive an Apple Scholars in AIML PhD fellowship. The prestigious award supports students through funding, internship opportunities, and mentorship with an Apple researcher.  Zhang is a 3rd-year iSchool Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Jacob. O Wobbrock. His research focuses…


March 15, 2024

New Book: Teaching Accessible Computing

From the first page of the book, a line drawing of a person hunched over a laptop with their face close to the screen which is populated by large, unreadable characters.

March 14, 2024 A new, free, and community-sourced online book helps Computer Science educators integrate accessibility topics into their classes. Teaching Accessibility provides the foundations of accessibility relevant to computer science teaching and then presents teaching methods for integrating those topics into course designs. The editors are Alannah Oleson, a postdoctoral scholar and co-founder at…


March 1, 2024

DUB hosts para.chi event

March 1, 2024 Para.chi is a worldwide parallel event to CHI ’24 for those unable or unwilling to join CHI ‘24. UW Design. Use. Build. (DUB) is hosting para.chi.dub with members of the DUB team–and maybe you. Wednesday, May 8, 2024 Hybrid event: Seattle location to be announced and virtual info shared upon registrationPresenter applications due…


Three Myths and Three Actions: “Accommodating” Disabled Students

February 29, 2024 Excerpted from the Winter 2024 Allen School DEIA newsletter article contributed by CREATE Ph.D. students Kelly Avery Mack and Ather Sharif, with Lucille Njoo. Completing graduate school is difficult for any student, but it’s especially difficult when you’re trying to learn at an institution that isn’t built for you. Students with disabilities…


February 29, 2024

Wheels in motion: Improving mobility technologies for children

February 28, 2024 Being able to easily get from the house to the playground affects how long and how often children use an adapted ride-on car, according to a study, Off to the park: a geospatial investigation of adapted ride-on car usage, published by CREATE Ph.D. student Mia Hoffman with CREATE associate directors Heather A….


February 15, 2024

Joshua Miele: Driving Accessibility through Open Source

February 15, 2024 Formally, Dr. Joshua Miele describes himself as a blind scientist, designer, performance artist and disability activist who is focused on the overlap of technology, disability, and equity. But in his personable and humorous lecture, he listed a few more identities: Interrupter. Pain in the ass. “CAOS” promoter. The Allen School Distinguished Lecture…


January 29, 2024

Alice Wong and Patty Berne: Two UW lectures moderated by CREATE researchers

Winter 2024 quarter kicked off with two outstanding conversations with women of color who are leaders in disability justice. Alice Wong: Raising the visibility of disabled people First, Alice Wong discussed topics important to her work in raising the visibility of disabled people. Wong’s book Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life was the topic of…


January 8, 2024

Anat Caspi receives Human Rights Educator Award

Congratulations to Anat Caspi on receiving the 2023 Human Rights Education Award from the Seattle Human Rights Commission! Caspi is a CREATE associate director and the founder and director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology. About the award she said, “I have always thought making an impact on local communities is where it starts,”…


January 2, 2024

CREATE Welcomes Dr. Olivia Banner!

January 2, 2024 In her role as CREATE’s Director of Strategy and Operations, Olivia Banner, Ph.D., will help develop and oversee organizational strategy, design and implement new programs, manage center operations, and help ensure a sustainable trajectory of high quality work in service of the CREATE’s core mission.  Banner is a disabled author and educator who…


Postdoctoral fellowship application open: Accessibility researcher in physical computing and fabrication

CREATE and UW departments are looking for a postdoc researcher to investigate using fabrication and physical computing technologies to address accessibility.


December 14, 2023

ARTennis attempts to help low vision players

December 16, 2023 People with low vision (LV) have had fewer options for physical activity, particularly in competitive sports such as tennis and soccer that involve fast, continuously moving elements such as balls and players. A group of researchers from CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich‘s Makeability Lab hopes to overcome this challenge by enabling…


November 27, 2023

UW News: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals

November, 2023 Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a…


November 8, 2023

Community Partner Spotlight: PAVE

November 8, 2023 CREATE is pleased to work with PAVE (Partnerships for Action | Voices for Empowerment) to help guide our efforts and shape solutions around the needs and limitations of accessible technology. They’ve supported our grant applications, shared opportunities for participation in CREATE research projects with their community, and published CREATE research on the…


Off to the Park: A Geospatial Investigation of Adapted Ride-on Car Usage

November 7, 2023 Adapted ride-on cars (ROC) are an affordable, power mobility training tool for young children with disabilities. But weather and adequate drive space create barriers to families’ adoption of their ROC.  CREATE Ph.D. student Mia E. Hoffman is the lead author on a paper that investigates the relationship between the built environment and…


November 2, 2023

UW News: Can AI help boost accessibility? CREATE researchers tested it for themselves

November 2, 2023 | UW News Generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, an AI-powered language tool, and Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator, can potentially assist people with various disabilities. They could summarize content, compose messages, or describe images. Yet they also regularly spout inaccuracies and fail at basic reasoning, perpetuating ableist biases. This year, seven CREATE researchers conducted…


October 30, 2023

UW News: A11yBoard accessible presentation software

October 30, 2023 | UW News A team led by CREATE researchers has created A11yBoard for Google Slides, a browser extension and phone or tablet app that allows blind users to navigate through complex slide layouts, objects, images, and text. Here, a user demonstrates the touchscreen interface. Team members Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang, Jacob O. Wobbrock,…


October 27, 2023

Augmented Reality to Support Accessibility

October 25, 2023 RASSAR – Room Accessibility and Safety Scan in Augmented Reality – is a novel smartphone-based prototype for semi-automatically identifying, categorizing, and localizing indoor accessibility and safety issues. With RASSAR, the user holds out their phone and scans a space. The tool uses LiDAR and camera data, real-time machine learning, and AR to…


October 24, 2023

ASSETS 2023 Papers and Posters

October 4, 2023 As has become customary, CREATE faculty, students and alumni will have a large presence at the 2023 ASSETS Conference. It’ll be quiet on campus October 23-25 with these folks in New York. Papers and presentations How Do People with Limited Movement Personalize Upper-Body Gestures? Considerations for the Design of Personalized and Accessible…



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