CREATE researchers shone this spring at the 2023 Web4All 2023 conference that, in part, seeks to “make the internet more accessible to the more than one billion people who struggle to interact with digital content each day due to neurodivergence, disability or other impairments.” Two CREATE-funded open source projects won accolades.
Built on prior research to develop taxonomies of information sought by screen-reader users to interact with online data visualizations, the team’s research used these taxonomies to extend the functionality of VoxLens—an open-source multi-modal system that improves the accessibility of data visualizations—by supporting drilled-down information extraction. They assessed the performance of their VoxLens enhancements through task-based user studies with 10 screen-reader and 10 non-screen-reader users. Their enhancements “closed the gap” between the two groups by enabling screen-reader users to extract information with approximately the same accuracy as non-screen-reader users, reducing interaction time by 22% in the process.
Authors: Ather Sharif, Aneesha Ramesh, Qianqian Yu, Trung-Anh H. Nguyen, and Xuhai Xu
Ather Sharif’s work on another project, UnlockedMaps, was honored with the Accessibility Challenge Delegates’ Award. The paper details a web-based map that allows users to see in real time how accessible rail transit stations are in six North American cities, including Seattle, Toronto, New York and the Bay Area. UnlockedMaps shows whether stations are accessible and if they are currently experiencing elevator outages. Their work includes a public website that enables users to make informed decisions regarding their commute and an open source API that can be used by developers, disability advocates, and policy makers for a variety of purposes, including shedding light on the frequency of elevator outages and their repair times to identify the disparities between neighborhoods in a given city.
The CREATE community thanks three of our founding leaders for their energy and service in launching the center as we embark upon some transitions. “CREATE would not be where it is today without the vision, passion, and commitment that Jake, Richard, and Anat brought to their work leading the center,” says CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff.
Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock: From vision, to launch, to sustainable leadership
It was back in June 2019 that Jacob O. Wobbrock, CREATE’s founding Co-Director, was on a panel discussion at Microsoft’s IdeaGen 2030 event, where he talked about ability-based design. Also on that panel was future CREATE Associate Director Kat Steele. After the event, the two talked with Microsoft Research colleagues, particularly Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris, about the possibility of founding an accessible technology research center at the University of Washington.
Wobbrock and Steele thought that a center could bring faculty together and make them more than the sum of their parts. Within a few months, Wobbrock returned to Microsoft with Jennifer Mankoff, Richard Ladner, and Anat Caspi to pitch Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, on the idea of supporting the new Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). With additional support from Microsoft President Brad Smith, and input from Morris, the center was launched by Smith and UW President Ana Marie Cauce at Microsoft’s Ability Summit in Spring 2020.
Wobbrock, along with Mankoff, served as CREATE’s inaugural co-directors until June 2023, when Wobbrock stepped down into an associate director role, with Mankoff leading CREATE as sole Director. “I’m a founder by nature,” Wobbrock said. “I helped start DUB, the MHCI+D degree, a startup called AnswerDash, and then CREATE. I really enjoy establishing new organizations and seeing them take flight. Now that CREATE is soaring, it’s time for more capable hands than mine to pilot the plane. Jennifer Mankoff is one of the best, most capable, energetic, and visionary leaders I know. She will take CREATE into its next chapter and I can’t wait to see what she does.” Wobbrock will still be very active with the center.
Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner, one of CREATE’s founders and our inaugural Education Director
We thank Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner for three years of leadership as one of our founders and CREATE’s inaugural Education Director. Ladner initiated the CREATE Student Minigrant Program that helps fund small grants up to $2,000 in support of student initiated research projects.
Ladner has shepherded 10 minigrants and worked directly with eight Teach Access Study Away students. Through his AccessComputing program, he helped fund several summer research internships for undergraduate students working with CREATE faculty. All CREATE faculty contribute to accessibility related education in their courses, where he provides encouragement.
Anat Caspi defined and elevated CREATE’s translation efforts, leveraging the center’s relationships with partners in industry, disability communities, and academia. Her leadership created sustainable models for translation and built on our prior successes. Collaborations with the TASKAR center, HuskyADAPT, and the UW Disability Studies Program have ensured diverse voices to inform innovation.
Director of Translation duties will be distributed across Mankoff, CREATE’s Community Engagement and Partnerships Manager Kathleen Quin Voss, and the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, which Caspi directs.
Led by Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) Ph.D. candidate Emma McDonnell and supported by CREATE, this work investigates how groups with both hearing and d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) members could be better supported when using captions during videoconferences.
Researchers recruited four groups to participate in a series of codesign sessions, which de-centers researchers’ priorities and seeks to empower participants to lead the development of new design ideas. In the study, participants reflected on their experiences using captioning, sketched and discussed their ideas for technology that could help build accessible group norms, and then critiqued video prototypes researchers created of their ideas.
One major finding from this research is that participants’ relationships with each other shape what kinds of accessibility support the group would benefit from.
For example, one group that participated in our study were cousins who had been close since childhood. Now in their mid-twenties, they found they did not have to actively plan for accessibility; they had their ways of communicating and would stop and clarify if things broke down. On the other hand, a group of colleagues who work on technology for DHH people had many explicit norms they used to ensure communication accessibility. One participant, Blake, noted,“I was pretty emotional after the first meeting because it was just so inclusive.” These different approaches demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to communication accessibility – people work together as a group to develop an approach that works for them.
This paper also contributes new priorities for the design of videoconferencing software. Participants focused on designing add-ons to videoconferencing systems that would better support their group in communicating accessibly. Their designs fell into four categories:
Speaker Identity and Overlap: Having video conferencing tools identify speakers and warn groups when multiple people speak at once, since overlapping speech can’t be captioned accurately. Participants found this to be critical, and often missing, information.
Support for Behavioral Feedback: Building in ways for people to subtly notify conversation partners if they need to adjust their behavior. Participants desired tools to flag when people need to adjust their cameras, critical caption errors, and if speech rate gets too high. They considered, but decided against, a general purpose conversation breakdown warning.
Videoconferencing Infrastructure for Accessibility: Adding more features and configurable settings around conversational accessibility to videoconferencing platforms. Participants desired basic controls, such as color and font size, as well as the ability to preset and share group accessibility norms and customize behavior feedback tools.
Sound Information: Providing more information about the sound happening during a conversation. Participants were excited about building sound recognition into captioning tools, and considered conveying speech volume via font weight, but decided it would be overwhelming and ambiguous.
This research also has implications for broader captioning and videoconferencing design. While often captioning tools are designed for individual d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, researchers argue that we should design for the entire group having a conversation. This shift in focus revealed many ways that, on top of transcribing a conversation, technology could help groups communicate in ways that can be more effectively captioned. Many of these tools are easy to build with current technology, such as being able to click on a confusing caption to request clarification. The research team hopes that their work can illuminate the need to pay attention to groups’ social context when studying captioning and can provide videoconferencing platform designers a design approach to better support groups with mixed hearing abilities.
McDonnell is advised by CREATE Associate Directors Leah Findlater, HCDE, and Jon Froehlich, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
Current: Clinical Scientist at Gillette Children’s Hospital, leading research in the Gillette Rehabilitation Department to improve healthcare outcomes for children with complex movement conditions.
Elijah Kuska, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: In Silico Techniques to Improve Understanding of Gait in Cerebral Palsy
Dual Ph.D.s in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Math
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Plans: Megan will join the UW AI Institute as a postdoc in Spring of 2023 to pursue clinical translation of her methods to evaluate digital biomarkers to support health and function from wearable data.
Nicole Zaino, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: Walking and rolling: Evaluating technology to support multimodal mobility for individuals with disabilities
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, 2018 – Present
Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship, University of Washington, 2022
Best Paper Award at the European Society of Movement Analysis for Adults and Children, 2019.
Finalist, International Society of Biomechanics David Winter Young Investigator Award, 2019
Plans: Nicole is headed to Bozeman Montana to join the Crosscut Elite Training team to work toward joining the national paralympic nordic ski team for Milano-Cortina 2026, while working part-time with academia and industry partners.
Ricky Zhang
Dissertation: Pedestrian Path Network Mapping and Assessment with Scalable Machine Learning Approaches
Advisors: Anat Caspi and Linda Shapiro
Plans: Ricky will be a postdoc in Bill Howe’s lab at the University of Washington.
Kat Steele, who has been busy advising four out of five of these new PH.D.s, noted, “We have an amazing crew of graduate students continuing and expanding upon much of this work. We’re excited for new collaborations and translating these methods into the clinic and community.”
The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center. The Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion (EARN) helps employers, human resources professionals, and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility staff find the resources they need to recruit, hire, retain and advance people with disabilities.
EARN’s work has received several awards, particularly for its popular Inclusion@Work Framework, a seven-part guide for building a disability-inclusive workplace.
The U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) aims to increase the number and quality of employment opportunities for people with disabilities by developing and influencing policies and practices.
The machines and devices we use every day – for example, touch screens, gas pedals, and computer track pads – interpret our actions and intentions via sensors. But these sensors are designed based on assumptions about our height, strength, dexterity, and abilities. When they aim for the average person (who does not actually exist), they aren’t usable or accessible.
CREATE Post-doctoral student Momona Yamagami seeks to integrate personalization and customization into sensor design and the resulting algorithms baked into the products we use. Her research has shown that biosignal interfaces that use electromyography sensors, accelerometers, and other biosignals as inputs provide promise to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.
In a recent presentation of her research as a CREATE postdoctoral scholar, she emphasizes that generalized models that are not personalized to the individual’s abilities, body sizes, and skin tones may not perform well.
Momona Yamagami presenting her biosignal research, with a slide noting that biosignals fluctuate and are higher on the neural circuitry and a smartwatch as an “always on” sensors for continuous health monitoring.
Individualized interfaces that are personalized to the individual and their abilities could significantly enhance accessibility. Continuous (i.e., 2-dimensional trajectory-tracking) and discrete (i.e., gesture) electromyography (EMG) interfaces can be personalized to the individual:
For the continuous task, we used methods from game theory to iteratively optimize a linear model that mapped EMG input to cursor position.
For the discrete task, we developed a dataset of participants with and without disabilities performing gestures that are accessible to them.
As biosignal interfaces become more commonly available, it is important to ensure that such interfaces have high performance across a wide spectrum of users.
Momona Yamagami is completing her time as a CREATE postdoctoral scholar, advised by CREATE Co-director Jennifer Mankoff. Starting summer 2023, Yamagami will be an Assistant Professor at Rice University Electrical & Computer Engineering as part of the Digital Health Initiative.
In April 2023, CREATE hosted its first ever Accessible eSports Showcase event, bringing together members of the CREATE community, local community organizations, tech and games Corporate Partners, and folks from all over the Seattle area looking to learn about and celebrate ongoing strides being made in making video games more inclusive and accessible to people with disabilities.
Zillow Commons in the Bill & Melinda Gates Center was transformed into a gamer’s playground with big-screen projections of racing and party games, a VR space, and stations where users could customize their own adaptive gaming tech.
CREATE’s Community Partners had showcase tables, demoing the latest advances in accessible gaming technology. And UW graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs highlighted the many creative ways they’ve worked to make games accessible:
Event co-organizers Jesse Martinez (Ph.D. student, CSE) and Momona Yamagami (Postdoc, UW CREATE) opened with an overview of the many accommodations and community access norms they established for the event.
Emma McDonnell (Ph.D. Student, HCDE) live-narrated a round of Jackbox Games’s Fibbage, followed by a competitive mixed-ability showdown in the Xbox racing game DiRT 5, in which Martinez, taking his turn as emcee/color commentator, highlighted the many techniques being used to make Xbox gameplay accessible.
Rachel Franz (Ph.D. Student, iSchool) let attendees try out her latest work in accessible VR research.
Jerry Cao (Ph.D. Student, CSE) showed attendees how to use custom 3D-printed input devices for computer accessibility.
A brilliant team of undergraduates from HuskyADAPT, including Mia Hoffman, Neha Arunkumar, Vivian Tu, Spencer Madrid, Simar Khanuja, Laura Oliveira, Selim Saridede, Noah Shalby, and Veronika Pon, demoed three fantastic projects working to bring improved switch access to video games.
Corporate and Community Partners connected with the CREATE community and engage directly with our many attendees.
Solomon Romney, of Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab, showcased the brilliant design of the Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC), the state-of-the-art tool in accessible controller design, and guided attendees through setting up and playing with their own XACs.
Amber Preston of Seattle Adaptive Sports described the work SAS does to make all sorts of games and recreational activities more accessible and inclusive in the Seattle area.
Other corporate and community partners, including researchers from Meta, Google, and Apple, were on hand to meet and connect with attendees around other exciting developments in the accessible gaming space.
The organizers thank all attendees, partners, volunteers, and organizers for making the event such a success! As gaming accessibility continues to blossom, we’re looking forward to doing more events like in the future – we hope to see you at the next one!
Pre-event announcement
Who should attend?
Anyone is welcome to attend this event! In particular, we extend the invitation to anyone who has an interest in video game accessibility, who works in the games industry, or who is a member of the Seattle-area disability community.
More information about the event will be available here soon! In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our event co-organizer Jesse Martinez at jessejm@cs.washington.edu. We hope to see you there!
Stipend and paid parking for non-UW-affiliated attendees
For our attendees with disabilities who are not affiliated with UW, we will have a $50 stipend to cover local travel and time spent at the event. You will receive a gift card link within 10 business days after the event. We will also pay for event parking. We hope that will be helpful in covering some of the costs of attending this event.
Activities
Mainstagegameplay
Attendees can go head-to-head in our accessible esports tournament that will include Forza Horizon 5 and Rocket League.
Spotlight tables
Engage with CREATE corporate and community partners around game accessibility, including Seattle Adaptive Sports, Microsoft XBox, HuskyADAPT, and UW CREATE. Participate in accessible gaming tech demos, and more!
Non-competitive gameplay
In addition to the mainstage gameplay, there will be various accessible video games available to play, ranging from cooperative games to streamed large-audience party games. We’ll also have a VR station available! Games will include
Jackbox Party Pack Games
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Beat Saber
Socializing, networking and food
We will also have designated spaces for attendees to socialize with each other and make new connections in the accessible gaming space. Dinner will be provided.
Accessibility & logistics
Wheelchair-accessible space & accommodations
The building entrance is level from Stevens Way and Zillow Commons is wheelchair-accessible via the elevator and wide doorways. A volunteer will be at the building entrance to help guide you to the event.
We will have the following accommodations in place:
Live gameplay commentary on Mainstage gameplay
Captions and ASL interpretation for all Mainstage content
Quiet room with ample seating and a silent livestream of Mainstage gameplay
For those interested in playing games, we will have the following devices:
Xbox Adaptive Controllers with customizable switches, joysticks, and foot pedals
Additional specialty gaming equipment provided by industry partners (TBD)
If you have any additional accommodation requests, please include them in your event registration, or reach out to Jesse Martinez at jessejm@cs.washington.edu.
Considerations to keep in mind
During the event, attendees can support each other with the following considerations:
Introduce yourself by name in a conversation.
Keep pathways clear, and be mindful of others when navigating the space.
DO NOT touch other attendees, their assistive devices, or their mobility devices without consent.
Please keep conversation family-friendly as there are children at the event.
Please wear a mask and keep your hands clean (hand sanitizer is available throughout the venue).
Questions?
Please reach out to Jesse Martinez (event co-organizer) at jessejm@cs.washington.edu with questions about this event.
For more than 25 years, Cooper has been developing technology to improve the lives of people with disabilities and his inventions have helped countless wheelchair users get around with more ease and comfort.
Cooper’s first innovations in mobility were a modification to the back brace he wore after a spinal cord injury left him paralyzed from the waist down, then a better wheelchair, then an electric-powered version that helped its user stand up. After earning his Ph.D. in electrical & computer engineering with a concentration in bioengineering at University of California at Santa Barbara, he focused his career on developing assistive technology.
The most common cause of emergency-room visits by wheelchair users is falling from the chair or tipping over. “This often happens when the individual’s wheelchair hits thresholds in doorways, drives off small curbs, or transitions from a sidewalk to a ramp,” Cooper said.
The MEBot, can climb curbs up to 20 centimeters high and can self-level as it drives over uneven terrain. It does so thanks to six wheels that move up and down plus two sets of smaller omnidirectional wheels in the front and back. The wheelchair’s larger, powered wheels can reposition themselves to simulate front-, mid-, or rear-wheel drive.
University of Washington student Carl James Dunlap had a powerful impact on the UW community with his vibrant personality and persistent advocacy for students with disabilities. To honor his legacy, the Dunlap family established the Carl James Dunlap Memorial Endowment. The Dunlap Memorial Endowment seeks to support students with disabilities encountering unique challenges when attending and completing higher education. The D Center is grateful to further Carl’s legacy by awarding two $2,000 Carl James Dunlap Memorial Scholarships to UW students for Winter 2023.
The Dunlap Memorial Scholarship selection criteria is a UW student who identifies as having a disability and is currently receiving financial aid.
The CREATE Year 1 Impact Report describes the major accomplishments of CREATE in Academic Year (AY) 2020-2021. It also lays out the goals for AY 2021-2022.
In this report:
Research: papers, collaboration, hiring and awards
Education: student programs, workshops and more awards
Translation: Conversation, Google Play store, Community Day
In December 2021, CREATE faculty Anat Caspi and Jon Froehlich discussed the innovative ways they are using AI, crowdsourcing, and translational research to reimagine urban accessibility.
Participants were invited to a deep dive into one of these initiatives – Project Sidewalk – to learn how to contribute to the crowd-sourcing efforts. Despite the important role of sidewalks in supporting mobility, accessibility, and public health, there is a lack of high-quality datasets and corresponding analyses on sidewalk existence and condition.
Project Sidewalkexplores a twofold vision: first, to develop scalable mechanisms to locate and assess sidewalks in cities across the world using Crowd+AI approaches, and second, to use this data to support new urban analyses and mobility tools.
Project Sidewalk is currently deployed in seven cities, including two in Mexico.
Join the Reimagining Mobility conversation
Join us for a series of conversations imagining the future of mobility. Hosted by CREATE Associate Directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, we connect and learn from guests who are engaged in critical mobility work – ranging from researchers to small business owners to self-advocates. We will dive deeply into conversations about mobility as a multifaceted concept, and explore how it intersects with other dimensions of access across contexts of research, education, and public policy.
On November 18, 2021 Dr. Yochai Eisenberg shared successes and challenges in the pursuit of accessible pedestrian networks. We discussed community mobility as it relates to accessible pathways, use of public transportation, and modes of travel to destinations.
Dr. Eisenberg described a systematic mobility evaluation, detailed some of the findings, and shared the conclusion that communities in the U.S. do not have strong plans for building accessible pathways. He stressed that the solution includes meaningfully involving people with disabilities, so that transition plans can help cities.
Dr. Yochai Eisenberg is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago and affiliated researcher at the Great Lakes ADA Center. Dr. Eisenberg studies the ways in which neighborhood environments, policies, and systems impact community mobility, health behaviors and health outcomes for people with disabilities using a blend of big data analytics, policy evaluation, and community engaged research.
Dr. Eisenberg’s research has contributed to better understanding implementation of ADA transition plans for the public rights of way in the US, rideshare use and satisfaction among people with disabilities, and accessibility of environments that support healthy, active living. Dr. Eisenberg’s interdisciplinary work reflects his training in public health (Ph.D.), urban planning (Master’s) and disability studies and is interwoven in his undergraduate course that explores the links between disability, urban planning and geography.
Join the Reimagining Mobility conversation
Join us for a series of conversations imagining the future of mobility. Hosted by CREATE Associate Directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, we connect and learn from guests who are engaged in critical mobility work – ranging from researchers to small business owners to self-advocates. We will dive deeply into conversations about mobility as a multifaceted concept, and explore how it intersects with other dimensions of access across contexts of research, education, and public policy.
On October 13, 2021 Karen Braitmayer shared images from her experience of— and critical goals for— inclusive architecture. Noting that the best and brightest designers might come in bodies that are different than employers expect, she called for design schools to welcome students with disabilities and for design firms to hire and support the careers of designers with disabilities.
First steps for designers:
Provide options: wider seats, different height soap dispensers, etc.
Learn about building codes and regulations.
Talk to folks who have already figured out how to accommodate for their own disabilities and hack for accessibility.
Architect Karen L. Braitmayer, FAIA, is the founding principal of Studio Pacifica, an accessibility consulting firm based in Seattle, Washington. Her “good fight” has consistently focused on supporting equity and full inclusion for persons with disabilities.
In 2019, she was chosen as the national winner of the AIA Whitney M. Young, Jr. award—a prestigious award given to an architect who “embodies social responsibility and actively addresses a relevant issue”. In the award’s 48-year history, she was the first recipient honored for their work in the area of civil rights for persons with disabilities. Braitmayer was also appointed by President Barack Obama to the United States Access Board, a position she retains today.
Join the Reimagining Mobility conversation
Join us for a series of conversations imagining the future of mobility. Hosted by CREATE Associate Directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, we connect and learn from guests who are engaged in critical mobility work – ranging from researchers to small business owners to self-advocates. We will dive deeply into conversations about mobility as a multifaceted concept, and explore how it intersects with other dimensions of access across contexts of research, education, and public policy.
