UW CREATE

Category: RESEARCH

News about research from CREATE faculty and partners and peers.

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

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.