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…
Category: RESEARCH
News about research from CREATE faculty and partners and peers.
CREATE at ASSETS 2024: Papers & Workshops
September 25, 2024 If we missed any CREATE research, please email Liz Diether-Martin with the details. Awards ASSETS 2024 Best Paper Award:Engaging with Children’s Artwork in Mixed Visual-Ability FamiliesArnavi Chheda-Kothary, Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jon E. Froehlich (CREATE associate director) ASSETS 2024 Best Demo Award:Touchpad Mapper: Examining Information Consumption From 2D Digital Content Using Touchpads by Screen CREATE Ph.D. alumni Ather Sharif and Venkatesh Potluri, Jazz Ang (CREATE Master’s student), Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE associate director), Jennifer Mankoff (CREATE Director). Papers…
Ability-Based Design Mobile Toolkit: Developer Support for Runtime Interface Adaptation
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 create the “optimal”…
CREATE awarded $4.6M for research on AI risks, opportunities for people with disabilities
CREATE will be leading a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on participatory, assistive, inclusive, and responsible use of AI technology, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), a program of the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The interdisciplinary team of researchers involved with this RERC come from the College of Engineering, the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, Disability Studies, and Rehabilitation Medicine. Aligning…
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 disability?…
Breaking Barriers with an Emotion Translator: A Glimpse into the Future of Communication
June 20, 2024 Autistic individuals can face difficulty navigating social and emotional interactions, leading to exclusion, misunderstandings, and stress. CREATE faculty member Annuska Zolyomi presented research at CHI 2024 that seeks to tackle these difficulties through a novel approach. Zolyomi, an assistant professor of Computing & Software Systems at UW Bothell, and co-author Jaime Snyder, an Associate Professor at the UW Information School, asked autistic adults to imagine futuristic technology that could translate emotions just as spoken languages are translated. The result was a…
Anat Caspi speaks at White House panel on AI in Transportation
June 17, 2024 CREATE associate director Anat Caspi spoke on ‘Mapping, Visualizing, and Building the Future’ as part of a White House panel on AI in Transportation. Focused on developing a national transportation infrastructure observatory and an accompanying application ecosystem, the panel gathered innovators in transportation, aiming to align end users, researchers, entrepreneurs, and federal agencies while addressing privacy, cybersecurity, and policy challenges. Dr. Caspi highlighted the Taskar Center’s pioneering work on AI and transportation, particularly through the Transportation Data…
CREATE Papers and Presentations at CHI 2024
This is a work in progress as there are many papers and presentations from CREATE researchers at CHI 2024, the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. We appreciate your patience! For a list of all papers from UW researchers, see DUB’s roundoup. Papers A Virtual Reality Scene Taxonomy: Identifying and Designing Accessible Scene-Viewing Techniques Rachel L. Franz, UW Information School (iSchool); Sasa Junuzovic, Microsoft; Martez E Mott, Microsoft. An Emotion Translator: Speculative Design by Neurodiverse Dyads Annuska…
Empowering users with disabilities through customized interfaces for assistive robots
March 15, 2024 For people with severe physical limitations such as quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate personal assistant robots could bring a life-enhancing level of independence and self-determination. Allen School Ph.D. candidate Vinitha Ranganeni and her advisor, CREATE faculty member Maya Cakmak, have been working to understand and meet the needs of users of assistive robots. This month, Ranganeni and Cakmak presented a video at the Human Robot Interaction (HRI) conference that illustrates the practical (and touching) ways deploying an…
CREATE AI+Accessibility Hackfest – Winter ’24
March 6, 2024 – post-event update In March 2024, CREATE gathered with industry and community partners for a hackfest to explore and invent the future of AI and Accessibility. The event featured invited speakers Heather Nolis, Ian Stenseng, and Shaun Kane and exciting workshops on building custom GPT and creating accessible Jupyter notebooks. See the full lineup of brainstorming, hacking, and presentation sessions. The 3-day hackfest attendees included those with no experience in coding or hacking, others with advanced experience in…
Wheels in motion: Improving mobility technologies for children
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…
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….
Winter 2023 CREATE Research Showcase
December 12, 2023 Students from CSE 493 and additional CREATE researchers shared their work at the December 2023 CREATE Research Showcase. The event was well attended by CREATE students, faculty, and community partners. Projects included, for example: an analysis of the accessibility of transit stations and a tool to aid navigation within transit stations; an app to help colorblind people of color pick makeup; and consider the accessibility of generative AI while also considering ableist implications of limited training data….
UW News: 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,…
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…
UW News: 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 timeMomona Yamagami, Alexandra A Portnova-Fahreeva, Junhan Kong, Jacob O. Wobbrock, Jennifer Mankoff Understanding Digital Content Creation Needs…