News about research from CREATE faculty and partners and peers.
CREATE Community Day 2021 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.
CREATE members highlighted what their labs are doing, with time to hear about a variety of individual projects. Read on for a sample of the presentations.
Schedule of events for the 2021 CREATE Research Showcase. Open to the public, CREATE faculty and students share research in accessibility.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…