Congratulations to Emma McDonnell on receiving a Dennis Lang Award from the UW Disability Studies program! McDonnell, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Human Centered Design & Engineering, is advised by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater.
McDonnell’s research focuses on accessible communication technologies and explores how these tools could be designed to engage non-disabled people in making their communication approaches more accessible. She has studied how real-time captioning is used during videoconferencing and her current work is exploring how people caption their TikTok videos.
The Dennis Lang Award recognizes undergraduate or graduate students across the UW who demonstrate academic excellence in disability studies and a commitment to social justice issues as they relate to people with disabilities.
The team conducted a 3-week field deployment of the Amazon Echo Dot in the homes of seven older adults to understand how older, infrequent users of technology perceive and use voice assistants. They observed consistent usage for finding health-related information, highlighting concerns about credibility of information with this new interaction medium.
Leah Findlater, CREATE Associate Director
And while voice-based interaction appeared to be easy to learn, the study pointed to some usability and accessibility challenges to be addressed, including:
Devices timing out before users complete their voice commands
Unclear and inconsistent voice commands that must be remembered
Dependency on paired computing devices
Lack of awareness of the voice assistance device’s capabilities
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 seeing the great things that come of it. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners.”
— Prof. Jacob O. Wobbrock, Founding Co-Director, UW CREATE
Best artifact: SoundWatch, as described in the paper Exploring Smartwatch-based Deep Learning Approaches to Support Sound Awareness for Deaf and Hard of Hearing Users Dhruv Jain, Hung Ngo, Pratyush Patel, Steven Goodman, Leah Findlater, Jon Froehlich Links: github code repository | presentation video
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 require an action… [and] these devices can also enhance people’s experiences and help them feel more connected to the world,” said lead author Dhruv Jain, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
The SoundWatch smartwatch app that identifies nearby sounds and alerts wearers. Jain et al./ASSETS 2020
The team presented their findings Oct. 28 at ACCESS, the ACM conference on computing and accessibility.
Learn more about SoundWatch, the full team and how the smartwarch app evolved from a collection of tablets scattered around a house.
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.
An autoethnograher’s daughter’s handcrafted cane, as presented in the paper, “Living disability theory: Reflections on access, research, and design.”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
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
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.
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 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.
