Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is designed to get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than 1,000,000,000 people with disabilities.
UW GAAD 2025
CREATE is working with UW Accessible Technology Services to co-host a day of presentations, workshops, and discussions.
Thursday, May 15, 9 a.m. – 6 p.m. | See the schedule
On the UW Seattle campus in HUB 250 | virtual via Zoom
Registration required: Register for daytime events | Register for Joshua Miele book talk
Accommodation requests: Contact Susie Hawkey, 206-543-6504, by April 30
Watch for these CREATE offerings:
Best Practices for Accessible Presentations
CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff will introduce CREATE participating postdocs Emma McDonnell and Avery Mack for a presentation on disability history and accessibility best practices. Dr. Mack will teach best practices for accessible presentations. Dr. McDonnell will cover basic disability studies history and concepts, important grounding for any kind of work with people with disabilities.
Interdisciplinary Computing Instructors Workshop
CREATE faculty member Kevin Lin hosts a 2-hour workshop designed for instructors in all disciplines – the humanities, arts, and sciences who teach courses involving computing, programming, or data analysis. Connect with and learn from other UW instructors around resources and ideas for making computing courses more accessible and meeting the 2026 digital accessibility requirements. A short keynote will be followed by parallel interactive tutorials led by accessibility experts on topics such as pedagogy, community, teaching tools, assessment, and visuals. During breakout sessions and virtual coffee breaks, instructors meet for one-on-one conversations and networking. Join for the entire event, or either half.
Evening Book talk with Joshua Miele
CREATE collaborator Joshua Miele will talk about his new memoir, Connecting Dots. This evening event, held in the Gates/CSE2 Bezos Seminar Room G04, is also free. Registration is required.
In his book, Dr. Miele shares his unique approaches to solving accessibility challenges, such as automated tools for generating tactile maps, a somewhat shady scheme for crowd-sourcing descriptions of YouTube videos, and a brief but brutal sabotage campaign against inaccessible ATMs in the late 90s.
In collaboration with veteran journalist Wendell Jamieson, Miele tells the story of his personal and professional blind life. From Brooklyn to Berkeley, from childhood to parenthood, from student to scholar, and beyond, this book describes Miele’s experience growing up, coming of age, and establishing a life and career as a blind person in a sighted world. He offers his professional take on widely-shared challenges of blindness, such as access to maps and graphics, access to video content, and the challenge of managing uninvited “assistance” from sighted strangers.