Eight years ago, CREATE Co-Director Jennifer Mankoff and a group of like-minded researchers who cared about, or needed, accessibility put their heads together after coming to a realization about SIGCHI, the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. While a growing swath of researchers in the community had begun to focus on the design and evaluation of technologies for diverse users, including those with disabilities, Mankoff and her colleagues noted that the venues for showcasing that work — including the group’s flagship annual conference, CHI — were not themselves accessible to many of these same audiences. And thus, AccessSIGCHI was born.
“Around the time we launched, nearly one-tenth of the papers presented at CHI were related to accessibility or disability in some way, yet only about 20% of conferences included accessibility support,” recalled Mankoff, who holds the Richard E. Ladner Professorship in the Allen School where she directs the Make4All Group. “I and Jennifer Rode, who founded AccessSIGCHI, asked ourselves, ‘how can we ensure that our community’s publications and events and procedures make accessibility a priority?’ It’s a necessary conversation, if not always a comfortable one. And it’s ongoing.”
Read more:
- Full article, published by the Allen School.
- Mankoff and colleagues’ seminal report documenting the state of accessibility within the SIGCHI community and laying out a vision for the future.
- Recognition of Mankoff’s efforts to make not only technologies but also the community that creates them more accessible to members with diverse needs and experiences through a 2022 SIGCHI Social Impact Award.
This article was excerpted from A necessary conversation: Social Impact Award winner Jennifer Mankoff inspires the SIGCHI community to take a more expansive view of inclusion, published by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
More advocacy news from CREATE
Access Board’s Preliminary Findings on AI and People with Disabilities
January 21, 2025 This month, the United States Access Board presented its preliminary findings on the risks and benefits of AI for people with disabilities (PWD). The overall goal of these recommendations is to make AI more inclusive, transparent, and responsible, ensuring that people with disabilities are both protected and empowered in AI-driven environments. The…
Anat Caspi speaks at White House panel on AI in Transportation
June 17, 2024 CREATE associate director Anat Caspi spoke on ‘Mapping, Visualizing, and Building the Future’ as part of a White House panel on AI in Transportation. Focused on developing a national transportation infrastructure observatory and an accompanying application ecosystem, the panel gathered innovators in transportation, aiming to align end users, researchers, entrepreneurs, and federal…
Three Myths and Three Actions: “Accommodating” Disabled Students
CREATE Ph.D. students Kelly Avery Mack and Ather Sharif, along with Lucille Njoo, share three common myths about students with disabilities. They reveal the reality of their inequitable experience as grad students at UW, and propose a few potential solutions to begin ameliorating this reality, both at our university and beyond.
Alice Wong and Patty Berne: Two UW lectures moderated by CREATE researchers
January 29, 2024 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…
Research at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility
October 13, 2023 What are the opportunities for research to engage the intersection of race and disability? What is the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies? Two CREATE Ph.D. students have explored these questions and found little focus on this intersection within accessibility research.…