2025 Race, Disability and Technology Funded Research

September 22, 2025 We are happy to report that this year we received more applications for the RDT grants than in previous years. We also received more applications from outside of CREATE, possibly a sign of our increased outreach to and visibility on campus, and certainly an indication of the importance of this grant mechanism to research efforts across the university. Learn more The Race, Disability, and Technology Initiative Call for Proposals – Race, Disability, and Technology Tier I project:…

With new NIH funding, CREATE postdoc Bethany Sloane continues research for children with cerebral palsy, motor delays

September 15, 2025 Exploration and self-initiated mobility are known to support growth in learning, communication, social skills, and play. Yet, due to limited training, funding, or access to different types of devices, powered mobility devices are often underused in early intervention and pediatric therapy settings. Bethany Sloane’s research is focused on addressing these issues, to ensure that children under the age of three have opportunities to explore their environments and participate in daily life through mobility. She aims to create…

Blind and Low Vision Teens Join CREATE through YES2 Summer Internships

September 3, 2025 The Washington Department of Services for the Blind (DSB) program, called Youth Employment Solutions 2, provides experience, instruction, and paid 5-week summer internships. The students share a house, have job placements, and learn skills in using public transportation for travel to work sites. When ready, the students commute to their jobs independently. Statistics indicate that more than 70% of blind adults are either unemployed or under-employed, in jobs unequal to their education. However, evidence also indicates that…

GAAD Day 2025 Interview with CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff

Dr. Mankoff, a professor in the Information School and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, will speak at the UW’s GAAD mid-day program on Thursday, May 15. What initially drew you to the intersection of computing, accessibility, and disability studies? I was a computer scientist first—and then I became disabled. That personal shift made me start thinking about how technology could better meet my needs. My first faculty position was at UC Berkeley, which was at…

James Fogarty inducted into SIGCHI Academy

May 13, 2025 A central figure in Seattle’s human-computer interaction (HCI) community and beyond, Fogarty has made key contributions in accessibility, sensor-based interactions, interactive machine learning, and personal health informatics. He has played a pivotal role in founding and growing Design, Use, Build (DUB) — the UW’s cross-campus HCI alliance bringing together faculty, students, researchers and industry partners. “I am honored to be among the SIGCHI Academy Class of 2025,” Fogarty said. “I’m grateful for the amazing students and collaborators…

GazePointAR makes sense of spoken questions through eye gaze, gestures and past conversations

May 31, 2024 “What’s over there?” “How do I solve this math problem?” If you try asking a voice assistant (VA) like Siri or Alexa such questions you won’t get much information. While VAs are transforming human-computer interaction, they can’t see what you’re looking at or where you’re pointing. CREATE Ph.D. student Jaewook Lee has led an evaluation of GazePointAR, a fully-functional, context-aware VA for wearable augmented reality (AR) that uses eye gaze, pointing gestures, and conversation history to make…

“Dude, what am I gonna do with a touchscreen? It’s crazy. I can’t feel anything.”

March 26, 2025 The iPhone 1 with a touchscreen — but no accessibility features for people who were blind — was released in September 2007. A few years later, Tim Paulding, who is blind, ran his fingers across the smooth glass screen of an iPod Touch for the first time. He was working as a counselor at a summer camp for blind kids outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, when a friend handed him the then top-of-the-line iPod. “I’m like, ‘Dude, what…

Coffee Chat Recaps – Winter 2025

March 4, 2025 Topics have included opportunities for student involvement in CREATE, how researchers can benefit from community-engaged research, and where to find funding for research. These meetings have proved useful for sharing ideas, experiences, and information. Future Coffee Chats UW students and faculty, make sure you’re subscribed to either the CREATE Students or CREATE Faculty internal mailing list. Also, subscribe to the CREATE event calendar. For accessibility info, contact Dr. Olivia Banner, CREATE’s Director of Strategy and Operations. Community-engaged…

Former CREATE postdoc Sasha Portnova talks about her experiences and inspirations

November 22, 2024 Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Portnova, a postdoctoral researcher with CREATE in 2022-24, was interviewed about those experiences as a NIDILRR-funded fellow and about her work in rehabilitation research. In the National Rehabilitation Information Center interview, Portnova spoke about the value of the CREATE ARRT fellowship in transitioning from the overwhelming life as a Ph.D. student into a faculty career. Currently, Portnova is a research scientist in the Neuromechanics & Mobility Lab, directed by CREATE associate director Katherine M….

Mobile 3D printer can autonomously add accessibility features to a room

October 29, 2024 Built on a modified consumer vacuum robot, MobiPrint can automatically measure a room and print objects onto its floor to add accessibility features, home customizations, or artistic flourishes to the space. The prototype was built by a research team in the Makeability Lab. The team, led by CREATE Ph.D. student Daniel Campos Zamora and CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich, customized a graphic interface that lets users design objects that the robot has mapped out. The team…

Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit: Developer Support for Runtime Interface Adaptation

September 19, 2024 Despite significant progress, most apps remain oblivious to their users’ abilities. To enable apps to respond to users’ situated abilities, CREATE researchers developed the Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit (ABD-MT). ABD-MT integrates with an app’s user input and sensors to observe a user’s touches, gestures, physical activities, and attention at runtime to measure and model these abilities, and to adapt interfaces accordingly. With the goal of optimizing user interfaces to better suit users’ abilities, earlier systems attempt to…

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…

CREATE researchers find ChatGPT biased against resumes that imply disability, models improvement

June 24, 2024 This is the takeaway from CREATE Ph.D. student Kate Glazko, who got curious when she noticed recruiters posting online that they’d used OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates. Advised by co-author and CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff in the Allen School, Glazko studies how GAI can replicate and amplify real-world biases — such as those against disabled people. So how might such a system, she wondered, rank resumes that implied someone had a…

Hard Mode: Accessibility, Difficulty and Joy for Gamers With Disabilities

Video games often pose accessibility barriers to gamers with disabilities, but there is no standard method for identifying which games have barriers, what those barriers are, and whether and how they can be overcome. CREATE and Allen School Ph.D. student Jesse Martinez has been working to understand the strategies and resources gamers with disabilities regularly use when trying to identify a game to play and the challenges disabled gamers face in this process, with the hopes of advising the games…

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…

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…

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….

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 ROC usage. With her co-advisors Kat Steele and Heather A. Feldner, Jon E. Froehlich (all three CREATE associate directors), and Kyle N. Winfree as co-authors,…

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…

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, and Gene S-H Kim presented the research at ASSETS 2023. Screen readers, which convert digital text to audio, can make computers more accessible to many…