September 25, 2024 If we missed any CREATE research, please email Liz Diether-Martin with the details. Awards ASSETS 2024 Best Paper Award:Engaging with Children’s Artwork in Mixed Visual-Ability FamiliesArnavi Chheda-Kothary, Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jon E. Froehlich (CREATE associate director) ASSETS 2024 Best Demo Award:Touchpad Mapper: Examining Information Consumption From 2D Digital Content Using Touchpads by Screen CREATE Ph.D. alumni Ather Sharif and Venkatesh Potluri, Jazz Ang (CREATE Master’s student), Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jennifer Mankoff (CREATE Director). Papers…
Category: Announcements
CREATE awarded $4.6M for research on AI risks, opportunities for people with disabilities
CREATE will be leading a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on participatory, assistive, inclusive, and responsible use of AI technology, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), a program of the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The interdisciplinary team of researchers involved with this RERC come from the College of Engineering, the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, Disability Studies, and Rehabilitation Medicine. Aligning…
Feldner team funded to study health outcomes
September 9, 2024 The collaboration, including researchers from the UW Department of Rehabilitation, the UW iSchool, and the University of Pittsburgh, is funded by a 5-year, $3.2 million NIH R01 grant — the first funding of its kind from the NIH to support ableism and health disparity research. “The long-term goal of this work is to reduce disparities and maximize participation, health, and quality of life in partnership with people with mobility disabilities. This work will leverage our team’s multidisciplinary…
Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship for Reham Abuatiq
June 13, 2024 Advised by CREATE associate director Heather Feldner, Abuatiq’s dissertation work explores the Healthcare Transition of Middle Eastern Youth with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and their Families. Using both qualitative and participatory methods, her research goals are to: Abuatiq is currently working with one of CREATE’s community partners, Open Doors for Multicultural Families (ODMF), which provides grassroots community-based services and supports for immigrants and refugees in the WA area living with disabilities. ODMF plans to host a photo exhibition in…
Congrats to CREATE’s Graduating Ph.D. Students 2024!
May 30, 2024 Four of CREATE’s influential and productive doctoral students are graduating this spring. Please join us in congratulating Kelly Avery Mack, Emma McDonnell, Venkatesh Potluri, Ather Sharif, and Rachel Franz and wishing them well. Profiles With too many accomplishments amongst them to list here, these almost-minted Ph.D.s collaborated on projects that have contributed to CREATE’s growth and success. In addition to mentoring undergraduate students, publishing and presenting papers, and working in labs and with researchers, here are a…
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 on using human-AI interactions to address real-world accessibility problems. He is particularly interested in designing and evaluating intelligent assistive technologies to make creativity tasks accessible….
New Book: Teaching Accessible Computing
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 the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination (LCI), CREATE and iSchool faculty Amy Ko, and Richard Ladner, CREATE Director of Education Emeritus. You may…
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 March 15 Register to attend by Monday, April 1. Do you have a virtual paper and wish to get feedback from a live audience? Perhaps you…
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.
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 took place earlier this month and is a worthwhile listen on YouTube. Miele’s passions are right in line with CREATE’s work and he started his…
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 the topic of the Autumn 2023 CREATE Accessibility Seminar. CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff started the conversation asking Wong about her experience as a disabled person…
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, a CREATE associate director and the founder and director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, thanked the commission for recognition of her individual dedication and emphasized that it also celebrates the collective efforts of the Taskar Center community. You can watch as Olivia Quesada accepts the award on Caspi’s behalf at the ceremony.
CREATE Welcomes Dr. Olivia Banner!
January 2, 2024 Banner is a disabled author and educator who has taught courses on disability, technology, and media. She comes to Seattle and the UW from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she was an associate professor of Critical Media Studies. She is the author of Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities. Her new book about technology, psychiatry, and practices of mutual care is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Her research has…
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 LV individuals to participate in ball-based sports using real-time computer vision (CV) and wearable augmented reality (AR) headsets. Their initial focus has been on tennis….
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 set of 11 actions a robotic arm can make to pick up nearly any food attainable by fork. In tests with this set of actions,…
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 a three-month autoethnographic study — drawing on their own experiences as people with and without disabilities — to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility. Though researchers…
CREATE’s Response to Proposed Update to Section 504 for Medical, Health
Updated November 30, 2023 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights published a proposed update to the HHS regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination by recipients of federal funding. This is the first comprehensive update to the regulations since they were first put in place more than 40 years ago. The proposed rule includes new requirements prohibiting discrimination in the areas of: For 60 days starting on…
Virtual Traffic Stop App Aims to Ease Tensions, Aid Communication
October 2, 2023 The designers of the Virtual Traffic Stop app aim to ease tensions and prevent misunderstandings between drivers and law enforcement during traffic stops. For Hard-of-Hearing or Deaf drivers, the app can be used to communicate with law enforcement via chat during the video. Users can add family members and invite them to the chat for additional assistance. A Gainesville Florida K-12 school has announced their endorsement of Virtual Traffic Stop and has encouraged parents and their children…
People with Disabilities are a Population with Health Disparities
September 29, 2023 In September 2023, the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities announced the designation of people with disabilities as a population with health disparities. The designation is one of several steps National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking to address health disparities faced by people with disabilities and ensure their representation in NIH research. Dr. Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, in consultation with Dr. Robert Otto Valdez, the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research…
Your Review & Comments Wanted: Proposed Federal Accessibility Standards
August 11, 2023 A proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities receiving federal funds was released for review by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 4, 2023. Anyone affected by these guidelines has 60 days — through Tuesday, October 3, 2023 — to comment. The DOJ is still trying to decide exactly what the rule should say, how quickly public entities should improve digital accessibility, and what exceptions to allow. For example, the current rule states that…