UW CREATE

Category: RESEARCH

News about research from CREATE faculty and partners and peers.

A Ph.D. Student’s Promising Research in Mobility in Cerebral Palsy

Whether she’s researching how biofeedback systems can guide gait training in children with cerebral palsy or leading toy adaptation events, Alyssa Spomer is committed to advancing accessible technology.

A Ph.D. student in UW Mechanical Engineering (ME) and advised by CREATE Associate Director Kat Steele, Spomer is the student chair of CREATE-sponsored HuskyADAPT. Her studies have been multidisciplinary, spanning ME and rehabilitation medicine. She uses her engineering skills to understand the efficacy of using robotic devices to target and improve neuromuscular control during walking.

“Delving into how the central nervous system controls movement and how these systems are impacted by brain injury has been such an interesting aspect of my work,” Spomer says. “My research is a mix of characterizing the capacity for individuals to adapt their motor control and movement patterns, and evaluating the efficacy of devices that may help advance gait rehabilitation.”

In her dissertation work, Spomer is primarily evaluating how individuals adapt movement patterns while using a pediatric robotic exoskeleton paired with an audiovisual biofeedback system that she helped design. The Biomtoum SPARK exoskeleton works to sense and support motion at the ankle during walking, using motors worn on a hip belt to provide either resistance or assistance to the ankles during walking. The audiovisual system is integrated into the device’s app and provides the user with real-time information on their ankle motion alongside a desired target to help guide movement correction.

Collage of two images. Left: Man walking on a treadmill wearing a robotic exoskeleton device around his hips and legs while a female researcher monitors the process through a tablet. Right: A closeup of the researcher's hands holding the tablet showing the real-time information.
The audiovisual system that Spomer helped design (shown on a screen in the right photo) provides the user with real-time information on their ankle motion alongside a desired target to help guide movement correction.

Inspired by CREATE’s Kat Steele and the Steele Lab

Spomer was drawn to ME by the Steele Lab’s focus on enhancing human mobility through engineering and design. Working with Kat Steele has been a highlight of her time at the UW.

“I really resonated with Kat’s approach to research,” Spomer says. “The body is the ultimate machine, meaning that we as engineers can apply much of our foundational curriculum in dynamics and control to characterize its function. The beauty of ME is that you are able to develop such a rich knowledge base with numerous applications which really prepares you to create and work in these multidisciplinary spaces.”

This winter, Spomer will begin a new job at Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare. She’s excited to pursue research that aligns with her Ph.D. work. Her goal remains the same: “How can we advance and improve the accessibility of healthcare strategies to help promote independent and long-term mobility?”

Excerpted from UW Mechanical Engineering, written by Lyra Fontaine with photos by Mark Stone, University of Washington. Read the full article

Large-Scale Analysis Finds Many Mobile Apps Are Inaccessible

Mobile apps have become a key feature of everyday life, with apps for banking, work, entertainment, communication, transportation, and education, to name a few. But many apps remain inaccessible to people with disabilities who use screen readers or other assistive technologies.

iStockPhoto image of several generic application icons such as weather, books, music, etc.

Any person who uses an assistive technology can describe negative experiences with apps that do not provide proper support. For
example, screen readers unhelpfully announce “unlabeled button” when they encounter a screen widget without proper information provided by the developer.

We know that apps often lack adequate accessibility, but until now, it has been difficult to get a big picture of mobile app accessibility overall.

How good or bad is the state of mobile app accessibility? What are the common problems? What can be done?

Research led by Ph.D. student Anne Spencer Ross and co-advised by James Fogarty (CREATE Associate Director) and Jacob O. Wobbrock (CREATE Co-Director) has been examining these questions in first-of-their-kind large-scale analyses of mobile app accessibility. Their latest research automatically examined data from approximately 10,000 apps to identify seven common types of accessibility failures. Unfortunately, this analysis found that many apps are highly inaccessible. For example, 23% of the analyzed apps failed to provide accessibility metadata, known as a “content description,” for more than 90% of their image-based buttons. The functionality of those buttons will therefore be inaccessible when using a screen reader.

A bar chart showing the percentage of application icons and images missing labels. Out of 8,901 apps, 23 percent were not missing labels, 23 percent were missing labels on all elements. The rest of the apps were missing labels for 6 to 7 percent of their elements.
Bar chart shows that 23 percent of apps are missing labels on all their elements. Another 23 percent were not missing labels on any elements. And the rest were missing labels on 6 to 7 percent of their elements.

Clearly, we need better approaches to ensuring all
apps are accessible. This research has also shown that large-scale data
can help identify reasons why such labeling failures occur. For example, “floating action buttons” are a relatively new Android element that typically present a commonly-used command as an image-button floating atop other elements. Our analyses found that 93% of such buttons lacked a content description, so they were even more likely than other buttons to be inaccessible. By examining this issue closely, Ross and her advisors found that commonly used software development tools do not detect this error. In addition to highlighting accessibility failures in individual apps, results like these suggest that identifying and addressing underlying failures in common developer tools can improve the accessibility of many apps.

Next, the researchers aim to detect a greater variety of accessibility failures and to include longitudinal analyses over time. Eventually, they hope to paint a complete picture of mobile app accessibility at scale.

CREATE + I-LABS: focus on access, mobility, and the brain

We are excited to celebrate the launch of a new research and innovation partnership between CREATE and the UW Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) focusing on access, mobility, and the brain.

Mobility technology such as manual and powered wheelchairs, scooters, and modified ride-on toy cars, are essential tools for young children with physical disabilities to self-initiate exploration, make choices, and learn about the world. In essence, these devices are mobile learning environments.

Collage of several toddlers playing, learning and laughing on modified ride-on toys

The collaboration, led by Heather Feldner and Kat Steele from CREATE, and Pat Kuhl and Andy Meltzoff from I-LABS, brings together expertise from fields of rehabilitation medicine and disability studies, engineering, language development, psychology, and learning. The team will address several critical knowledge gaps, starting with, How do early experiences with mobility technology impact brain development and learning outcomes? What are critical periods for mobility?

Read the full Research Highlight.

CREATE becomes a principal sponsor of HuskyADAPT

CREATE is pleased to be a financial and advisory sponsor of HuskyADAPT, an interdisciplinary community that is dedicated to improving the availability of accessible technology in Washington and fostering conversations about the importance of accessible design. 

HuskyADAPT is led by a team of UW students and six faculty advisors, including CREATE directors Kat Steele, Heather Feldner, Anat Caspi and Jennifer Mankoff. Open to all to join, their three primary focus areas are annual design projects, K-12 outreach and toy adaptation workshops, where volunteers learn how to modify off-the-shelf toys to make them switch accessible. The team also collaborates closely with Go Baby Go!.

Sign up for HuskyADAPT’s newsletter

HuskyADAPT logo, with 3 heaxagons containing icons of tools, people and vehicles.

Ga11y improves accessibility of automated GIFs for visually impaired users

Animated GIFs, prevalent in social media, texting platforms and websites, often lack adequate alt-text descriptions, resulting in inaccessible GIFs for blind or low-vision (BLV) users and the loss of meaning, context, and nuance in what they read. In an article published in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), a research team led by CREATE Co-director Jacob O. Wobbrock has demonstrated a system called Ga11y (pronounced “galley”) for creating GIF annotations and improving the accessibility of animated GIFs.

Video describing Ga11y, an Automated GIF Annotation System for Visually Impaired Users. The video frame shows an obscure image and the question, How would you describe this GIF to someone so they can understand it without seeing it?

Ga11y combines the power of machine intelligence and crowdsourcing and has three components: an Android client for submitting annotation requests, a backend server and database, and a web interface where volunteers can respond to annotation requests.

Wobbrock’s co-authors are Mingrui “Ray” Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate in the UW iSchool, and Mingyuan Zhong, a Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

Part of this work was funded by CREATE.

Wobbrock team’s VoxLens allows screen-reader users to interact with data visualizations

A screen reader with a refreshable Braille display. Credit: Elizabeth Woolner/Unsplash

Working with screen-reader users, CREATE graduate student Ather Sharif and Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock, along with other UW researchers, have designed VoxLens, a JavaScript plugin that allows people to interact with visualizations. To implement VoxLens, visualization designers add just one line of code.

Millions of Americans use screen readers for a variety of reasons, including complete or partial blindness, learning disabilities or motion sensitivity. But visually-oriented graphics often are not accessible to people who use screen readers. VoxLens lead author Sharif, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering noted, “Right now, screen-reader users either get very little or no information about online visualizations, which, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, can sometimes be a matter of life and death. The goal of our project is to give screen-reader users a platform where they can extract as much or as little information as they want.”

With written content, there is a beginning, middle and end of a sentence, Wobbrock, Co-senior author explained, “But as soon as you move things into two dimensional spaces, such as visualizations, there’s no clear start and finish. It’s just not structured in the same way, which means there’s no obvious entry point or sequencing for screen readers.”

Participants learned how to use VoxLens and then completed nine tasks, each of which involved answering questions about a visualization. Compared to participants who did not have access to this tool, VoxLens users completed the tasks with 122% increased accuracy and 36% decreased interaction time.

Learn more

This article was excerpted from a UW News article. Read the full article for additional details about the project.

Findlater and co-authors receive 2020 Best Paper award for study of Voice Assistants by Older Adults

The Association for Computing Machinery announced the 2020 Best Paper Award goes to Use of Intelligent Voice Assistants by Older Adults with Low Technology Use, co-authored by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater, Alisha Pradhan and Amanda Lazar.

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.

Headshot of Leah Findlater, smiling warmly. She is a white woman with brown hair.

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

Feldner and Steele’s ‘Reimagining Mobility’ series featured in The Daily

Collaboration and diverse perspectives and approaches are at the heart of CREATE’s mission to make technology accessible and make the world accessible though technology.

One program developed by CREATE faculty looks at mobility solutions and ways to eliminate barriers. Hosted by CREATE associate directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, the Reimagining Mobility Conversation Hub brings in speakers from a variety of backgrounds and industries to inspire conversations about the future of mobility.

The UW student newspaper, The Daily, featured the program in Reimagining Mobility: Professors Amplify Disabled Voices in the November 15 2021 issue.

Headshot of Kat Steele, smiling warmly. She is a white woman with long brown hair.

Working at a children’s hospital made me want to grow my knowledge as an engineer. There was just this disconnect of how we thought about technology, how we thought about what was possible, and what was actually available.

Dr. Kat Steele, CREATE Associate Director and Albert S. Kobayashi Endowed Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Headshot of Heather Feldner, smiling brightly. She is a white woman with short brown and grey hair, and wears dark rimmed glasses, a gray shirt and black sweater.

How we move around really impacts our social relationships. It impacts our ability to participate in school, in jobs, in social events — it’s really one of our major connections to the world. The end goal of mobility is to engage in our lives and participate meaningfully.

Dr. Heather Feldner, CREATE Associate Director and
Assistant Professor, Rehabilitation Medicine: Physical Therapy

Reimagining Mobility: Inclusive Architecture

Karen Braitmayer, seated in her wheelchair on the observation deck of the Space Needle, with full view of Seattle because obstructive walls were removed in a remodel
Click to view the captioned and transcribed video on YouTube

On October 13, 2021 Karen Braitmayer shared images from her experience of— and critical goals for— inclusive architecture. Noting that the best and brightest designers might come in bodies that are different than employers expect, she called for design schools to welcome students with disabilities and for design firms to hire and support the careers of designers with disabilities.

First steps for designers:

  • Provide options: wider seats, different height soap dispensers, etc.
  • Learn about building codes and regulations.
  • Talk to folks who have already figured out how to accommodate for their own disabilities and hack for accessibility.

Sign up for the Conversations

Karen Braitmayer using a wheelchair in a modern building with stairs and ramps

Architect Karen L. Braitmayer, FAIA, is the founding principal of Studio Pacifica, an accessibility consulting firm based in Seattle, Washington. Her “good fight” has consistently focused on supporting equity and full inclusion for persons with disabilities.

In 2019, she was chosen as the national winner of the AIA Whitney M. Young, Jr. award—a prestigious award given to an architect who “embodies social responsibility and actively addresses a relevant issue”. In the award’s 48-year history, she was the first recipient honored for their work in the area of civil rights for persons with disabilities. Braitmayer was also appointed by President Barack Obama to the United States Access Board, a position she retains today.

Join the Reimagining Mobility conversation

Join us for a series of conversations imagining the future of mobility. Hosted by CREATE Associate Directors Kat Steele and Heather Feldner, we 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. 

Sign up for the Conversations

Upcoming conversations

Stay tuned. 2022 series to be announced.

Past conversations

Flyer summarizing the information on Conversation Hub topics for Fall 2021
Download the Fall 2021 flyer (PDF)

CREATE Community Day & Research Showcase 2021

CREATE Community Day 2021, held on June 8, was a rich program that included an important discussion of the concerns and approaches to just, sustainable accessibility research that puts the needs of community members with disabilities front and center. Following this discussion, CREATE members highlighted what their labs are doing, with time to hear about a variety of individual projects. Here are some highlight videos of a small sample of the presentations:

Visual semantic understanding in blind and low-vision technology users
“I can bonk people!”: Effects of modified ride on cars on communication and socio-emotional development in children with disabilities
Blocks4All, an accessible blocks-based programming language
Decoding Intent With Control Theory: Comparing Muscle Versus Manual Interface Performance


Just one day later, the Future of Access Technology class held their final presentations. This class was designed to engage students in active contribution to the disability community, and included assignments to audio-describe videos for YouDescribe.org; try to address bugs within the NVDA open source screen reader community; and build first-person informed final projects on a wide range of topics, including:

  • Improved Word Alt Text plug-in modifies the default behavior in Microsoft PowerPoint when an image is inserted such that the user is prompted with a dialog box that guides them to create alt text that is high quality and contextually relevant to the image’s intended use.
    video preview | website
  • VSCodeTalk project implements a Visual Studio Code extension of CodeTalk, which  makes Visual Studio more accessible to visually impaired developers.
    video preview | website
  • Input Macros project makes it possible to easily add text shortcuts (e.g., “ty” automatically becomes “thank you”) in both Word and on the Web.
    video preview | website
  • Non-verbal Captioning project provides a SnapChat filter that explores how non-verbal captioning in video meeting applications can support DHH and other captioning users.
    video preview | website
  • Signal Monitoring for Accessibility for mobile and hardware programming makes serial port signal data, such as that generated by an Arduino system, accessible to BLV developers. Data can be copied to the system clipboard and audible cues are fired on significant events in the input data stream.
    video preview | website

CREATE Research Showcase – Spring 2021

Jun 8, 2021
9:30 a.m.
Register for Zoom invitation

The CREATE Community Meeting is open to the public.

Schedule

10:00 | Just Sustainable Accessibility Research – Panel

Although accessibility research is a fundamental component in reducing gaps in quality of life, health disparities, wealth disparities and digital access, many people with disabilities have had adverse experiences with researchers and accessibility professionals; consequently, communities and community members have lost trust in both the process of research and the people who conduct it. Too often, research has been conducted “on” rather than “with” people with disabilities and established communities, resulting in their being stigmatized or stereotyped. There has been increasing recognition that more comprehensive and participatory approaches to research and interventions are needed to address the complex set of determinants associated with problems that affect populations with disabilities, as well as those factors specifically associated with disparities affecting intersectional groups.

This panel aims to expose some of the tensions and problems facing people with disabilities when engaging in research. No attempts at solutions will be made.

11:00 |  Welcome

11:07 |  Lab fast-style presentations

CREATE labs introduce their work in 90 second segments.

11:30 | Showcase Breakout Sessions

Three breakout sessions, each lasting 17 minutes and 3 minutes between, are devoted to short presentations and Q&A about these CREATE-lab affiliated projects:

  • “Investigating visual semantic understanding in blind and low-vision technology users”
  • “Comparing muscle versus manual interface for people with and without limited movement”
  • “Living Disability Theory”
  • ““That’s Frustrating” – Stakeholder perceptions: provision processes, use, and future AFO needs for people with cerebral palsy”
  • “Decoding Intent With Control Theory: Comparing Muscle Versus Manual Interface Performance”
  • “Unimpaired adults can reduce motor control complexity during walking using biofeedback”
  • “Gait Recovery in Adults with Cervical Spinal Cord Injury Receiving Transcutaneous Spinal Stimulation”
  • “Reliability of Fitts’ Law”
  • “Stitching Together the Experience of Disabled Knitters”
  • “Mobility Gets Personal: Why Google Directions and Other Trip Planners Might Be Leading Us Where We May Not Want To Go”
  • “Perceptions of Disability and Mobility Technology Before and After Modified Ride-On Car Use in Caregivers of Children with Disabilities”
  • “”I can bonk people!”: Effects of Modified Ride On Cars On Communication and Socio-Emotional Development in Children with Disabilities”
  • “Ready, Set, Move! Tracking Children’s Modified Ride-On Car Use with a Custom Data Logger”
  • “Challenging Terrain: Community-Based Early Mobility Technology Research through the Lens of Critical Disability Theory”Time

Reimagining Mobility: Inclusive Living and Home Design

This UW CREATE event has passed. Continue to read a summary and watch a recording of the session. Sign up for future Reimagining Mobility Conversations.

You are looking for your first home – you’d like an open layout, 3 bedrooms, a big garage, lots of light, and easy access for your wheelchair. How many homes fit your criteria? Do the listings consider manual wheelchairs or bulkier powered wheelchairs with larger turning radii? These are just the start of the questions Barry Long would ask when viewing homes.

Barry Long is an advocate for people with disabilities who is helping to make real estate more accessible. In our third Conversation Hub session, Long shared how his passion for relationship building and helping others–combined with experiences as a manual wheelchair user, Dad and real estate broker–evolved into becoming a voting member of the Washington Building Code Council and advocating for standards for real estate listings.

Watch the conversation with Long about opening the door to accessible real estate and get a virtual look inside homes reimagined for inclusive living.

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

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 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.

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.
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.

Learn more

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.

An app for everything, but can everyone use it?

Medium | May 26, 2020

For most of us, the day seems to revolve around our phones: check email, read the news, pay bills, and get directions to the store. Mobile apps are essential in day-to-day life.

Unfortunately, many apps fail to be fully accessible to people with disabilities or those who rely on assistive technologies. As one blind app user noted, using an inaccessible app is “a constant feeling of being devalued. It doesn’t matter about the stupid button that I can’t press in that moment. It’s that it keeps happening. … And the message that I keep receiving is that the world just doesn’t value me.”

Anne Spencer Ross is a UW Ph.D. candidate in computer science, working on accessibility.  She wrote about the state of app accessibility and shared ways that app users and developers can help make apps work for everyone. 

Read more of Ross’ article

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.

Designing for the fullness of human experience

Anat Caspi and Taskar Center featured on King 5’s New Day Northwest

A familiar face joined Margaret Larson on New Day NW this morning. Anat Caspi, Director of the Taskar Center and Director of Translation for the UW Accessibility Center, shared recent innovations from robotics to smart, sensing environments.

Technology design has taken this stance about designing for the “average” person. And in many cases that is a big design mismatch to the needs and preferences of people who are not the “average” …

Anat Caspi

View the full interview on the King 5 website.

With AI and other tech, Anat Caspi focuses on helping people with disabilities

The Seattle Times | August 4, 2019

In her role as the director of the University of Washington’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, Caspi creates technology focused on people with disabilities such as motor limitations, in many instances applying artificial intelligence (AI).

“It’s really about treating people as humans with different needs and preferences,” she said as a cyclist passing by rang a bell.

She sees the mapping of pedestrian infrastructure — walkways, sidewalks, overpasses, underpasses and trails — as a necessary lifeline for people with disabilities. Everyone approaches an environment with different levels of attentiveness and perceptual and motor abilities. 

So Caspi and her Taskar team created a framework to log the features of sidewalk infrastructure in a project called OpenSidewalks, which is now being used by King County’s paratransit service to help people with disabilities navigate any trip. She also helped create AccessMap, an AI-powered online travel planner that identifies surfaces, slopes and obstacles to help users choose the best route for them.

Read full Seattle Times article.