UW CREATE

Category: Faculty Profiles

Faculty members of UW CREATE.

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 performance evaluation of people with limited mobility, media usage patterns of autistic adults, sound awareness for d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, and autoethnography reports of multiple people with disabilities. Congratulations to the authors and their collaborators!

We look forward to seeing you virtually at ASSETS 2020, which runs October 26 to 28.

A handcarved cane with a spiral design and painted green at the top
An autoethnograher’s daughter’s handcrafted cane, as presented in the paper, “Living disability theory: Reflections on access, research, and design.”
SoundWatch uses smartwatch-based deep learning approaches to support sound awareness for deaf and hard of hearing users.”
The SoundWatch, as described in the paper: “SoundWatch: Exploring smartwatch-based deep learning approaches to support sound awareness for deaf and hard of hearing users.”

Accepted papers

Input accessibility: A large dataset and summary analysis of age, motor ability and input performance

Leah Findlater, University of Washington
Lotus Zhang, University of Washington

The reliability of fitts’s law as a movement model for people with and without limited fine motor function

Ather Sharif, University of Washington
Victoria Pao, University of Washington
Katharina Reinecke, University of Washington
Jacob O. Wobbrock, University of Washington

Lessons learned in designing AI for autistic adults: Designing the video calling for autism prototype

Andrew Begel, Microsoft Research
John Tang, Microsoft Research
Sean Andrist, Microsoft Research
Michael Barnett, Microsoft Research
Tony Carbary, Microsoft Research
Piali Choudhury, Microsoft
Edward Cutrell, Microsoft Research
Alberto Fung, University of Houston
Sasa Junuzovic, Microsoft Research
Daniel McDuff, Microsoft Research
Kael Rowan, Microsoft
Shibashankar Sahoo, UmeΠInstitute Of Design
Jennifer Frances Waldern, Microsoft
Jessica Wolk, Microsoft Research
Hui Zheng, George Mason University
Annuska Zolyomi, University of Washington

SoundWatch: Exploring smartwatch-based deep learning approaches to support sound awareness for deaf and hard of hearing users

Dhruv Jain, University of Washington
Hung Ngo, University of Washington
Pratyush Patel, University of Washington
Steven Goodman, University of Washington
Leah Findlater, University of Washington
Jon E. Froehlich, University of Washington

Living disability theory: Reflections on access, research, and design

Megan Hofmann, Carnegie Mellon University
Devva Kasnitz, Society for Disability Studies
Jennifer Mankoff, University of Washington
Cynthia L Bennett, Carnegie Mellon University

Navigating graduate school with a disability

Dhruv Jain, University of Washington
Venkatesh Potluri, University of Washington
Ather Sharif, University of Washington

Accepted posters

HoloSound: Combining speech and sound identification for Deaf or hard of hearing users on a head-mounted display

Ru Guo, University of Washington
Yiru Yang, University of Washington
Johnson Kuang, University of Washington
Xue Bin, University of Washington
Dhruv Jain, University of Washington
Steven Goodman, University of Washington
Leah Findlater, University of Washington
Jon E. Froehlich, University of Washington

#ActuallyAutistic Sense-making on Twitter

Annuska Zolyomi, University of Washington
Ridley Jones, University of Washington
Tomer Kaftan, University of Washington

Organizing Committee roles

Dhruv Jain as Posters & Demonstrations Co-Chair
Cynthia Bennett as Accessibility Co-Chair

Program committee roles

Cynthia Bennett (recent alumni, now at Apple/CMU) 
Leah Findlater
Jon Froehlich
Richard Ladner
Anne Ross

New CREATE Conversation Hub: Reimagining Mobility

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.

Learn more & Sign-up

Read more about Reimagining Mobility and see future and past events.

Upcoming conversations

Richard Ladner Receives 2020 Public Service Award from National Science Board

National Science Board | August 11, 2020

Richard Ladner, Founder of AccessComputing and Allen School faculty member

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 his foundational experiences as a graduate student teaching hands-on mathematics in his community to co-founding AccessComputing, Dr. Ladner has spent his career educating and changing the conversation on diversity. In recognizing Ladner, the National Science Board (NSB) 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,” said Ladner.

As a faculty member, now Professor Emeritus, in the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, he has mentored 136 students, including 30 Ph.D. students. “I visited Richard’s lab at the University of Washington just over 10 years ago. While I did get to see Richard, he was most interested in my meeting his Ph.D. students — and I could see why,” recalled Vicki Hanson, CEO of the Association for Computing Machinery. “Richard had provided an atmosphere in which his talented students could thrive. They were extremely bright, enthusiastic, and all involved in accessibility research. I spent the day talking with his students and learning about their innovative work.”

Ladner has participated in, or organized, numerous computer science workshops for high school students with disabilities. Currently, he and his colleagues are developing accessible curricula and training teachers to help more students with disabilities participate in AP Computer Science Principles courses. Their curricula train teachers of blind and visually impaired students, teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students, and teachers of learning-disabled students.

In accepting congratulations for the reward, Ladner wrote to his peers, “I am very pleased and honored to receive this Public Service Award from the National Science Board. I’m very fortunate to be in a school where we support each other in our research, teaching, and service, including public service.”

Read more

This article includes excerpts from the NSB press release and the Allen School announcement.

AccessComputing shares UW CREATE’s launch and work toward accessibility

AccessComputing | July 28, 2020

AccessComputing highlighted several research projects of UW CREATE faculty. An excerpt:

CREATE’s stated mission is “to make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.” CREATE faculty pursue projects along both of these lines. Prof. [Jacob] Wobbrock was part of a team that helped make touch screens accessible by inventing Slide Rule, the world’s first finger-driven screen reader, in 2007. A research team including Profs. Richard Ladner, James Fogarty, and Wobbrock created GestureCalc, an eyes-free calculator for touch screens.

Prof. Jon Froehlich has created Project Sidewalk to use crowdsourcing and machine learning to gather and present outdoor navigation information, particularly the accessibility of sidewalks. Dr. Anat Caspi has a similar project called AccessMap, which provides personalized automated pedestrian routing.

Prof. Jennifer Mankoff conducts research on consumer-grade fabrication technology, such as low-cost 3D printing, and how this technology can be used to meet do-it-yourself or do-for-others accessibility challenges.

Professor Heather Feldner enables children with disabilities to explore the physical world through creative mobility support in her Go Baby Go project. [Kat Steele’s Open-Orthoses projects work with individuals with disabilities to co-design customized devices, rigorously test the devices, and provide open-source designs that accelerate development.]

For these and many other projects, 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.

Read the full article

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 launched Project Sidewalk in Seattle in April 2019, users have mapped roughly a third of the city’s 2,300 miles of sidewalks and labeled nearly 70,000 curb ramps, uneven surfaces, potential obstacles like lamp posts, too.

Read the full SeattleMet article.

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

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 answers questions about what CREATE will mean for his research, starting with ‘why do we need CREATE?’ and a very compelling answer: “We’re getting older and living longer. If we live long enough, we will all have disabilities. So the need for technology to be accessible, and for technology-mediated services to be accessible, is clearer than ever.”

Read the full iSchool article.

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, interdisciplinary faculty led by Wobbrock and co-director Jennifer Mankoff. 

Read full Seattle Times article.

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

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

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 inclusive mindset can shape contemporary health professions education and practice. Accessibility and technology will be a big part of these conversations and the subsequent training material development. To be able to approach this project with the multidisciplinary perspectives of the CREATE team as a resource is a huge asset.”

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 long-term collaborative relationships with faculty working on problems that will impact how future generations use technology,” according to Google.

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 a paper published at least a decade earlier that made a significant innovation that has been influential in the field.

Slide Rule addressed the challenge of navigating within a screen when mobile phones transitioned from physical buttons to touch screens. Their methods represented the first screen reader for touch screens, using simple gestures for navigation and tapping targets. These features have since become mainstream in commercial products.

Given the prevalence of touch screens in our society, the need to make them accessible to all people is still great, and we will continue to pursue that goal, along with the many other projects we are doing.

Jacob O. Wobbrock

As technology continues to advance, Wobbrock’s team continues to identify innovative methods for interaction that improve accessibility. Read more about the award and his recent research.

UW students join Teach Access Study Away program

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 these companies are making their products and services more accessible and usable. One of the UW students will join Microsoft as a software engineer at the end of the 2019-20 academic year and another two will join Microsoft as 2020 summer interns. 

Read more

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

Jennifer Mankoff, CREATE Director and co-founder

Contact

Mankoff faculty page

jmankoff@cs.uw.edu

Google Scholar icon Google Scholar

Research highlights

Better data sets that capture the varied experience of people with disabilities

Better data sets that capture the varied experience of people with disabilities are crucial to building better accessibility solutions. Mankoff has been involved in multiple pioneering data collection efforts. Most recently, her work capturing fine-grained, longitudinal behavioral data about the experiences of college undergraduates with and without disabilities has allowed her to study the unequal impacts of COVID-19’s changes to society on students with disabilities. She has also collected, and is currently exploring the first data set containing fine-grained end-to-end trip data about over 60 people with disabilities, combined with self reports of successes and failures. In the past, she collected over a year of real-world mouse data from individuals with various impairments, a data set whose size is unparalleled in a community that usually tests ideas on 1-10 individuals in lab settings. With this data, she was able to pioneer pixel based analysis methods that could improve on standard accessibility APIs, achieving a shift from 75% to 89% in accuracy identifying on-screen targets; demonstrate the huge variability within a single user and among many users with impairments that affect desktop computer use; and develop classifiers that could dynamically determine a user’s pointing ability with 92% accuracy on a single sample.

Better understanding of clinical and DIY accessible technology production

The advent of consumer-grade fabrication technology, most notably low-cost 3D printing, has opened the door to increasing power and participation in do-it-yourself and do-for-others accessible technology production. However, such production faces challenges not only at the level of process and policy, but with respect to materials, design tools, and follow-up. As summarized in a 2019 Communications of The ACM article, Mankoff has 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.

AccessSIGCHI directorship

Mankoff is the long-time director of AccessSIGCHI, the national group that has helped to improve conference accessibility in one of ACM’s largest professional groups, and is working collaboratively to help set standards and document best practices for use across ACM.

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Jacob O. Wobbrock, Founding Co-Director

My research seeks to scientifically understand people’s experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. My specific research topics include input & interaction techniques, human performance measurement & modeling, HCI research & design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing.

Affiliations:

Professor, The Information School

Adjunct Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Director, ACE Lab

Jake Wobbrock, Co-Director and founding faculty member of UW CREATE

Contact

Wobbrock faculty page

wobbrock@uw.edu

206-616-2541

Google Scholar icon Google Scholar

Research highlights

Slide Rule

A project that invented the world’s first touch-based finger-driven screen reader for smartphones. The interaction techniques employed by Slide Rule influenced Apple in their creation of VoiceOver, their built-in smartphone screen reader, and subsequently TalkBack on Android. Developed from 2007-2008, today Slide Rule has directly influenced products shipping on billions of touch devices. This work was recently honored for its impact.

Ability-Based Design

A new design approach developed from 2008-2020 that emphasizes what people can do and seeks to tailor technologies to people’s specific abilities through adaptation, customization, and ability-focused design practice. Interfaces that adapt to their users’ abilities, touch recognizers that model their users’ touch behaviors, and mouse cursors that dynamically adapt their speeds to make pointing more accurate were all projects that came from, and informed, ability-based design, whose 2018 Communications of the ACM article has been influential at major companies, including Microsoft.

Accessible Input Techniques

Mouse pointing and text entry are still the most fundamental inputs we give desktop and laptop computing systems, but for many users, these bedrock input capabilities are still inaccessible. Since my own doctoral research from 2001-2006, I have been inventing and evaluating more accessible means of providing input to computing systems. For example, my EdgeWrite technology provided more accessible text input using handheld devices, wheelchair joysticks, touchpads, and trackballs. Recently, my Pointing Magnifier 2 software, originally a research project with Leah Findlater, provides a cursor replacement on Microsoft Windows that has been useful to people with motor or visual impairments, older adults, and graphic designers.

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Anat Caspi, Director for Translation

I am interested in exploring ways in which collaborative commons and cooperation can challenge and transform the current economics of assistive technology and incentivize rapid development and deployment of ethically built accessible technologies. My research focuses on engineering machine intelligent solutions for customizable real-time, responsive technologies in the context of work, play and urban street environments.

Affiliations:

Affiliate Assistant Professor, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Director and co-founder, Taskar Center for Accessible Technology

Anat Caspi

Contact

Caspi faculty page

uwtcat@uw.edu

Research highlights

Equity in Transportation Data

All travelers want directions they can trust, but most maps and automated pedestrian routers do not have the data travelers with accessibility requirements need. When we built AccessMap, a personalized, automated pedestrian routing application that takes mobility limitations into consideration, it was clear that municipalities and agencies have not been effective in collecting and maintaining detailed pedestrian-centric map information. Users of AccessMap, currently served in Seattle, Bellingham, and Mt. Vernon, have made it clear with over 35,000 routing requests that people of all abilities require better mobility apps that provide customized information about the pedestrian environment. To scale our efforts, we created the OpenSidewalks data standard along with understandable tools for gathering sidewalk network data, focusing on (1) tools for individual citizen-scientist data entry (2) mass import tools for municipal datasets, and (3) automated computer vision pipelines to map geo-located videos. Our standard and methods for effective data exchange and sharing were recently adopted by King County Metro, Sound Transit, and MVTransit Inc, the largest paratransit operator company with worldwide presence.

The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT)

An initiative co-founded by Anat Caspi at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering to develop, translate and deploy open source, accessible technologies, with a focus on benefiting individuals with motor limitations or speech impairments. TCAT’s translation efforts promote collaborative use of data commons and shared community resources with the recognition that bringing novel accessible technologies to users requires challenging the traditional technology-transfer path. With our partners, we launched the first assistive technology and adapted toy lending library in the Pacific Northwest, serving physical technologies and online resources for others to replicate. Over the past 5 years, TCAT has engaged more than 200 undergraduate and 50 graduate design and engineering students in participatory design and inclusive design practices with our communities of practice, bringing together people of diverse abilities, backgrounds and skill sets towards a common goal of designing for the fullness of human abilities and experiences. 

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Richard Ladner, Director for Education

I am interested in accessibility technology research, especially technology for deaf, deaf-blind, hard-of-hearing, and blind people. Active in promoting the inclusion of persons with disabilities in computing fields, I am the Principal Investigator for the National Science Foundation funded AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll.

Affiliations:

Professor Emeritus, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Principal Investigator, AccessComputing

Principal Investigator, AccessCSforAll

Richard Ladner. He is wearing a button down blue shirt and colorful tie

Contact

Ladner faculty page

ladner@cs.washington.edu

206-543-9347

Google Scholar icon Google Scholar

Research highlights

ASL-STEM Forum

ASL-STEM Forum is a website for scientists who know American Sign Language (ASL) to upload signs for terms in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. These signs can be used by teachers, interpreters and other professionals in need of knowledge about how to sign a particular STEM term. Since 2010 more than 3000 signs have been uploaded with more than 1.3  million views on YouTube.

Perkinput

Perkinput is a non-visual text entry method for touchscreens based on Braille developed by Shiri Azenkot, a student of Richard Ladner and Jacob Wobbrock.  The method does not use specific targets but tracks fingers as they type six-dot Braille characters on the screen. Braille can be input with one hand on a small touchscreen or with two hands on a larger touchscreen.  In studies users can type up to 17 words per minute with one hand and 37 words per minute with two hands with high accuracy.  Braille-based text entry is now common on touchscreen devices.

Blocks4All

Blocks4All is an accessible block-based programming environment for young children developed by Lauren Milne, a student of Richard Ladner.  Block-based programming environments like Scratch, Alice, and many others are the most popular for young children to learn computing concepts such as conditional and loops.  Unfortunately, none of these environments are accessible to young screen reader users. Blocks4All is the first block-based programming environment for touchscreen devices that is fully accessible.

AccessComputing

AccessComputing is a National Science Foundation program, founded in 2006 and centered at the University Washington, with the goal of increasing the participation and success of individuals with disabilities in computing fields. It is a joint project with the Allen School, Information School, and the DO-IT center.  To date, it has served more than one thousand students across the United States providing professional development, peer mentoring, industry and research internships, and funding for travel to conferences.  With its 65+ academic, organizational, and industry partners, it has also focused on institutional change, influencing computing departments, organizations, and companies to make sure they are welcoming and accessible to people with disabilities.  

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Leah Findlater, Associate Director

I am interested in how to create technologies that adapt to accommodate individual user needs and preferences, whether to improve basic interactions such as touchscreen text entry or more complex tasks such as working with machine learning models. My research goal is to ensure that the next generation of computing technologies are designed to meet the needs of the broadest range of users.

Affiliations:

Associate Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering

Adjunct Associate Professor, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Director, Inclusive Design Lab

Contact

Findlater faculty page

leahkf@uw.edu

206-616-2653

Google Scholar icon Google Scholar

Research highlights

Expanding voice-based interaction

Over the past few years, conversational voice assistants (VAs) such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant have become ubiquitous. We have shown that VAs offer tremendous potential to support equal access to information, particularly for blind and low vision users: they are inherently accessible regardless of vision level and, as novice tools, they offer an approachable introduction to audio-based interaction for people unfamiliar with screen readers. However, VAs currently support only a limited set of tasks. In collaboration with researchers at Microsoft, we are investigating how to combine the strengths of screen readers–powerful expert tools–with the approachability of VA interaction. An example is our VERSE web search tool.

Real-time captioning and sound awareness support

With advances in wearable computing and machine learning, Jon Froehlich and I have been investigating new opportunities for real-time captioning and sound awareness support for people who are deaf/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Our work spans three primary areas: real-time captioning in augmented reality and wearables (ARCaptions), sound awareness support in the “smart home” (HomeSound), and real-time sound identification on smart watches (SoundWatch, website forthcoming). Throughout this work, we’ve engaged with over 250 DHH participants to help identify design opportunities, pain points, and to solicit feedback on our designs.

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James Fogarty, Associate Director

My broad research interests are in Human-Computer Interaction, User Interface Software and Technology, and Ubiquitous Computing. My focus is on developing, deploying, and evaluating new approaches to the human obstacles surrounding widespread everyday adoption of ubiquitous sensing and intelligent computing technologies.

Affiliations:

Professor, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

James Fogarty. He is wearing a striped grey and dark grey shirt

Contact

Fogarty faculty page

jfogarty@cs.uw.edu

206-685-8081

Google Scholar icon Google Scholar

Research highlights

Large-Scale Android Accessibility Analyses

Fogarty’s research group is leading the largest-known open analyses of the accessibility of Android apps, thus providing new understanding of the current state of mobile accessibility and new insights into factors in the ecosystem that contribute to accessibility failures (ASSETS 2017, ASSETS 2018, TACCESS 2020). For example, our analyses found that 45% of apps are missing screenreader labels for more than 90% of their image-based buttons, leaving much of the functionality of those apps inaccessible to many people. Such results also highlight that pervasive accessibility failures require continued research and new approaches to addressing contributing factors in the technology ecosystem. Our analyses of common failure scenarios has directly led to Google improvements in the accessibility ecosystem (e.g., corrections to Android documentation code snippets that were inaccessible, thus creating many accessibility failures as such snippets were used in apps) and motivated additional research (e.g., our ongoing work on developer tools that better scaffold developer learning about how to correctly apply accessibility metadata).

Runtime Mobile Accessibility Repair and Enhancement

Fogarty’s research group is developing new techniques for runtime repair and enhancement of mobile accessibility. Key to these approaches is a new ability to support third-party runtime enhancements within Android’s security model and without requiring modification to apps (CHI 2017, UIST 2018). We have applied these approaches to accessibility repair (e.g., techniques to allow social annotation of apps with missing screenreader data), but also to enable entirely new forms of tactile accessibility enhancements (ASSETS 2018). These techniques therefore provide a research basis for both improving current accessibility and exploring new forms of future accessibility enhancements.

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