February 28, 2024 Being able to easily get from the house to the playground affects how long and how often children use an adapted ride-on car, according to a study, Off to the park: a geospatial investigation of adapted ride-on car usage, published by CREATE Ph.D. student Mia Hoffman with CREATE associate director Heather A. Feldner, who is the lead researcher on the project. Their research demonstrates the importance of accessibility in the built environment and that advocating for environmental…
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Joshua Miele: Driving Accessibility through Open Source
February 15, 2024 Formally, Dr. Joshua Miele describes himself as a blind scientist, designer, performance artist and disability activist who is focused on the overlap of technology, disability, and equity. But in his personable and humorous lecture, he listed a few more identities: Interrupter. Pain in the ass. “CAOS” promoter. The Allen School Distinguished Lecture took place earlier this month and is a worthwhile listen on YouTube. Miele’s passions are right in line with CREATE’s work and he started his…
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…
Ben Taskar Memorial Event
January 26, 2024 In January 2024, the CREATE community was invited to participate in the Taskar Center’s 2024 Annual Ben Taskar Memorial Event, themed “Transportation and Responsible AI.” Sessions Project Poster Viewing and Team Discussions Explore innovative projects from the course on “Responsible Data Science in Urban Spaces” under the guidance of Anat Caspi, TCAT director, contributing to Dr. Caspi’s recent Human Rights Education Award. Community Townhall Meeting with Dragomir Anguelov oin us for a captivating discussion with Dragomir Anguelov,…
Anat Caspi receives Human Rights Educator Award
Congratulations to Anat Caspi on receiving the 2023 Human Rights Education Award from the Seattle Human Rights Commission! Caspi, a CREATE associate director and the founder and director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, thanked the commission for recognition of her individual dedication and emphasized that it also celebrates the collective efforts of the Taskar Center community. You can watch as Olivia Quesada accepts the award on Caspi’s behalf at the ceremony.
CREATE Welcomes Dr. Olivia Banner!
January 2, 2024 Banner is a disabled author and educator who has taught courses on disability, technology, and media. She comes to Seattle and the UW from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she was an associate professor of Critical Media Studies. She is the author of Communicative Biocapitalism: The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health Humanities. Her new book about technology, psychiatry, and practices of mutual care is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Her research has…
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….
How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals
November, 2023 Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a set of 11 actions a robotic arm can make to pick up nearly any food attainable by fork. In tests with this set of actions,…
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,…
Community Partner Spotlight: PAVE
November 8, 2023 CREATE is pleased to work with PAVE (Partnerships for Action | Voices for Empowerment) to help guide our efforts and shape solutions around the needs and limitations of accessible technology. They’ve supported our grant applications, shared opportunities for participation in CREATE research projects with their community, and published CREATE research on the importance of self-initiated mobility for children, particularly children with disabilities. PAVE’s mission is to provide support, training, information, and resources to empower and give voice…
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…
Augmented Reality to Support Accessibility
October 25, 2023 RASSAR – Room Accessibility and Safety Scan in Augmented Reality – is a novel smartphone-based prototype for semi-automatically identifying, categorizing, and localizing indoor accessibility and safety issues. With RASSAR, the user holds out their phone and scans a space. The tool uses LiDAR and camera data, real-time machine learning, and AR to construct a real-time model of the 3D scene, attempts to identify and classify known accessibility and safety issues, and visualizes potential problems overlaid in AR. …
ASSETS 2023 Papers and Posters
October 4, 2023 As has become customary, CREATE faculty, students and alumni will have a large presence at the 2023 ASSETS Conference. It’ll be quiet on campus October 23-25 with these folks in New York. Papers and presentations How Do People with Limited Movement Personalize Upper-Body Gestures? Considerations for the Design of Personalized and Accessible Gesture InterfacesMonday, Oct 23 at 11:10 a.m. Eastern time. Momona Yamagami, Alexandra A Portnova-Fahreeva, Junhan Kong, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Jennifer Mankoff Understanding Digital Content Creation…
Recommended Reading: Parenting with a Disability
October 16, 2023 Two recent publications address unnecessary challenges faced by parents with disabilities and how those challenges are made extraordinary by a legal system that is not protecting parents or their children. Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and Their Children The National Council on Disability report finds that roughly 4 million parents in the U.S. who are disabled (about 6% of parents) are the only distinct community that must struggle to retain custody of…
Research at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility
October 13, 2023 What are the opportunities for research to engage the intersection of race and disability? What is the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies? Two CREATE Ph.D. students have explored these questions and found little focus on this intersection within accessibility research. In their paper, Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility (PDF), they observe that we’re missing out on the full nuance of marginalized…
CREATE’s Response to Proposed Update to Section 504 for Medical, Health
Updated November 30, 2023 The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights published a proposed update to the HHS regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination by recipients of federal funding. This is the first comprehensive update to the regulations since they were first put in place more than 40 years ago. The proposed rule includes new requirements prohibiting discrimination in the areas of: For 60 days starting on…
CREATE’s Response to Proposed Digital Accessibility Guidelines
October 4, 2023 CREATE has submitted a response, in collaboration with colleagues within the UW and at peer institutions, to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities that receive federal funds (schools, universities, agencies, etc.). The DoJ proposal invited review of the proposed guidelines. The response commends the Department of Justice for addressing the issue of inaccessible websites and mobile apps for Title II entities through the approach proposed through the Notice of…
Virtual Traffic Stop App Aims to Ease Tensions, Aid Communication
October 2, 2023 The designers of the Virtual Traffic Stop app aim to ease tensions and prevent misunderstandings between drivers and law enforcement during traffic stops. For Hard-of-Hearing or Deaf drivers, the app can be used to communicate with law enforcement via chat during the video. Users can add family members and invite them to the chat for additional assistance. A Gainesville Florida K-12 school has announced their endorsement of Virtual Traffic Stop and has encouraged parents and their children…
People with Disabilities are a Population with Health Disparities
September 29, 2023 In September 2023, the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities announced the designation of people with disabilities as a population with health disparities. The designation is one of several steps National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking to address health disparities faced by people with disabilities and ensure their representation in NIH research. Dr. Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, in consultation with Dr. Robert Otto Valdez, the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research…