Mankoff wins AccessComputing Capacity Building award

Jennifer Mankoff, a white, Jewish woman. She is smiling broadly and standing casually in the Allen Center atrium

Congratulations to Jennifer Mankoff on receiving the AccessComputing Capacity Building Award! She was honored for her leadership in helping make all Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI) conferences accessible to attendees with disabilities. Through her leadership, the SIGCHI Executive Committee now has adjunct chairs for accessibility, which institutionalizes accessibility as an important facet of SIGCHI activities. Jen holds monthly online meetings of the AccessSIGCHI leadership team to help set and execute its agenda. Every year AccessComputing honors someone with the AccessComputing Capacity Building Award for…

CREATE faculty and students awarded at ASSETS 2020

Congratulations to UW CREATE faculty on multiple awards at ASSETS 2020, the International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility! “The University of Washington has been a leader in accessible technology research, design, engineering, and evaluation for years. This latest round of awards from ACM ASSETS is further testament to the great work being done at the UW. Now, with the recent launch of CREATE, our award-winning faculty and students are brought together like never before, and we are already…

SoundWatch smartwatch app alerts d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing users to sounds

A wrist with a smartwatch on it. The smartwatch has an alert that says "Car honk, 98%, Loud, 101 dB" It also has options to snooze the alert for 10 minutes or open in an app on the user's phone.

October 28, 2020 | UW News UW CREATE faculty members Jon Froehlich and Leah Findlater have helped develop a smartwatch app for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people who want to be aware of nearby sounds. The smartwatch will identify sounds the user is interested in — such as a siren, a water faucet left on, or a bird chirping — and send the user a friendly buzz along with information. “This technology provides people with a way to experience sounds that…

Feldner team receives grant to study pediatric mobility technology

CREATE Associate Director Heather Feldner and her research team have been awarded a pilot research grant from the newly founded NIH Pediatric Rehabilitation Resource Center (C-PROGRESS) to study early mobility technology. The team, one of only three selected across the country, includes Sam Logan, an associate professor at Oregon State University, and Lisa Kenyon, a professor at Grand Valley State University. Study Details: The use of powered mobility devices for young children with cerebral palsy (CP) has been gaining traction. …

NIH Rehabilitation Research 2020

October 13, 2020 Dr. Kat M. Steele, an associate director of CREATE, presents at NIH’s Rehabilitation Research 2020: Envisioning a Functional Future conference on Friday, October 16, 2020. She will be presenting in the Mobility Across the Lifespan session with Bernadette Gillick, PhD, PT from the University of Minnesota and Levi Hargrove from the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. This meeting highlights rehabilitation research and informs the congressionally-mandated NIH Research Plan on Rehabilitation Research to inform priorities for the next four years….

UW CREATE leadership at ASSETS 2020

UW CREATE has a large and quality presence at ASSETS 2020, the premier annual conference for accessible computing research. Drawing from three departments, University of Washington authors contributed to six papers and two posters to be presented at this year’s online conference. Three of our papers were nominated for best paper! Seven members also served in conference roles: two on the organizing committee and five on the program committee. The papers and posters span a variety of topics including input…

CREATE Conversation Hub: Reimagining Mobility

October, 2020 Mobility is a central part of accessibility and this new Conversation Hub, hosted by CREATE Associate Directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, provides a way to 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….

Richard Ladner Receives 2020 Public Service Award from National Science Board

National Science Board | August 11, 2020 Dr. Richard Ladner, CREATE’s Director for Education, has been named the 2020 recipient of the Public Service Award for an individual from the National Science Board (NSB). In recognizing Ladner, the board cited his exemplary science communication, diversity advocacy, and well-earned reputation as the “conscience of computing.” “When we think about diversity, we must include disability as part of that. The conversation about diversity should always include disability.” Richard Ladner, Professor Emeritus, University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering From…

AccessComputing shares UW CREATE’s launch and work toward accessibility

CREATE faculty are already internationally recognized for their contributions to assistive technology and accessible computing; by bringing them together under one organizational roof, CREATE will enable synergies and foster collaborations that enable faculty and students to become more than the sum of their parts.

Can Project Sidewalk Use Crowdsourcing to Help Seattleites Get Around?

July 23, 2019 | SeattleMet With the goal of making navigating our streets safer and easier for the mobility impaired, Jon Froehlich’s Project Sidewalk turns mapping sidewalks and improving pedestrian accessibility into a virtual game. To complete missions, users “walk” through city streets via Google Street View, labeling and rating the quality of sidewalks and features that make it easier—or tougher—to get around. They identify curb ramps, or lack thereof, assess their positioning, and point out tripping hazards. Since Froehlich…

Q&A with Jacob Wobbrock on UW’S new accessible technology research center

Jacob O. Wobbrock, a 40-something white man with short hair, a beard, and glasses. He is smiling in front of a white board.

iSchool news, University of Washington | May 28, 2020 Jacob O. Wobbrock, CREATE Co-Director and a professor in the UW Information School, has become one of the world’s foremost experts on accessible computing and human-computer interaction. His approach is to create interactive systems that can capitalize on the situated abilities of users, whatever they are, rather than make users contort themselves to become amenable to the ability-assumptions of rigid technologies. He calls this perspective Ability-Based Design. In the iSchool article, Wobbrock…

New UW center bankrolled by Microsoft aims to make technology more accessible to disabled people

The Seattle Times | May 28, 2020 University of Washington professor Jacob Wobbrock figures the best way to make technology more accessible to disabled people is to anticipate their needs from the very beginning. “The world we live in is built on certain assumptions,’’ Wobbrock said. “If we question those assumptions right from the start when we design things, then suddenly things are accessible.’’ The Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experience (CREATE) is launching with a nine-member,…

Microsoft invests $2.5M in CREATE, a new center for accessible tech at the University of Washington

UW iSchool Ph.D. candidate Martez Mott works on Smart Touch technology with Ken Frye at Provail

GeekWire | May 28, 2020 Microsoft and the UW have long been aligned in a shared commitment to accessible technology and a world that is more accessible through technology. With a leadership team from six campus departments in three different colleges, CREATE will build upon the UW’s existing work in education, research and translation. Read the full GeekWire article.

UW Disability Studies, D Center win UW Medicine CLIME Grant

UW faculty and staff affiliated with CREATE, UW Disability Studies and the UW D Center have received a grant from the Center for Leadership and Innovation in Medical Education (CLIME) to explore what it means to be an ally to people with disabilities. “This is an integral issue informing professional education in the medical fields as well as in design and engineering, says PI Heather Feldner. “I am most excited that this project has the potential to further the conversation about how an…

Kat Steele honored by students with FACET award

April 2020. Kat Steele, CREATE Associate Director and the Albert S. Kobayashi Endowed Professor of Mechanical Engineering, received a 2020 Faculty Appreciation for Career Education & Training (FACET) award from appreciative students. Presented by the Career Center @ Engineering, the award recognizes faculty members who have positively impacted their career and professional development.

Four CREATE faculty receive Google Research Awards

UW News | March 16, 2020 Four UW CREATE faculty have been named recipients of Google Faculty Research Awards. The grants, among 150 Google recently announced, support world-class technical research in computer science, engineering and related fields. Each award provides funding to support one graduate student for a year. The recipients are Jennifer Mankoff, James Fogarty and Jon Froelich of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and Leah Findlater of the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering. The goal of the awards is “to identify and strengthen…

ASSETS Paper Impact Award

Jacob Wobbrock honored for improving touch-screen accessibility Congratulations to Jacob O. Wobbrock, a founding co-director of CREATE, for his work with Shaun Kane, PhD ’11 and Jeffrey Bigham, PhD ’09 improving the accessibility of mobile technology. The team received the 2019 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award for their 2008 paper, “Slide Rule: Making mobile touch screens accessible to blind people using multi-touch techniques.” The award is given biennially by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing and recognizes…

CREATE presence at Tapia

Picture of UW attendees at TAPIA conference

Many members of CREATE were in attendance at the 2019 Tapia Conference. Jennifer Mankoff gave a plenary speech (CMD-IT Interview). Accessibility played a big role at TAPIA, and AccessComputing, a partner of CREATE, had a big presence.

UW students join Teach Access Study Away program

Richard Ladner, mentor, and 5 UW students at Study Away Silicon Valley

May 25, 2019 Five University of Washington students, joining a group of 25 students from 7 different universities, traveled to Silicon Valley in May 2019 to participate in the Teach Access program Study Away Silicon Valley (SASV). Professor Ladner served as one of six faculty mentors for the small group projects that participating students completed during the five days of SASV. The students visited the accessibility teams at Walmart, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Verizon Media Group (Yahoo!), and Facebook, where they learned how each of…

Jennifer Mankoff, Founding Co-Director

My research focuses on accessibility and 3D printing. I have led the effort to better understand both clinical and DIY stakeholders in this process, and developed better, more usable tools for production. Together, these can enhance the capabilities and participation of all users in today’s manufacturing revolution. Affiliations: Richard E. Ladner Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering Director, Make4all Lab Contact Mankoff faculty page jmankoff@cs.uw.edu Google Scholar Research highlights Better data sets that capture the varied…