December 20, 2024 At HuskyADAPT‘s holiday toy adaptation event in November, about 80 volunteers adapted toys, ranging from a baseball pitching machine and spinning art kit to lava lamps, remote control cars and a bilingual play drum. The volunteers connected the toys to a switch that can make it easier for children with disabilities to interact with the object in a way that’s accessible to them, such as pressing a button, moving their head or blowing air. For example, a…
Category: student_news
Former CREATE postdoc Sasha Portnova talks about her experiences and inspirations
November 22, 2024 Dr. Alexandra (Sasha) Portnova, who was a postdoctoral research with CREATE in 2022-24, was interviewed about those experiences as a NIDILRR-funded fellow and about her work in rehabilitation research. In the National Rehabilitation Information Center interview, Portnova spoke about the value of the CREATE ARRT fellowship in transitioning from the overwhelming life as a Ph.D. student into a faculty career. Currently, Portnova is a research scientist in the Neuromechanics & Mobility Lab, directed by CREATE associate director…
HuskyADAPT Mini Hackathon: Adaptive Solutions
November 18, 2024 This month, CREATE’s ARRT postdocs postdocs and HuskyADAPT students partnered with our partners King County Library Systems (KCLS) and Washington Assistive Technology Act Program (WATAP) to put on an impressive and successful hackfest. The goal was to design adaptations to everyday challenges for people with disabilities. All six teams came up with innovative solutions. No prizes were given out, but the best “prize” is that there is a plan to further develop the most feasible solutions and give…
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…
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?…
Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship for Reham Abuatiq
June 13, 2024 Advised by CREATE associate director Heather Feldner, Abuatiq’s dissertation work explores the Healthcare Transition of Middle Eastern Youth with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and their Families. Using both qualitative and participatory methods, her research goals are to: Abuatiq is currently working with one of CREATE’s community partners, Open Doors for Multicultural Families (ODMF), which provides grassroots community-based services and supports for immigrants and refugees in the WA area living with disabilities. ODMF plans to host a photo exhibition in…
Congrats to CREATE’s Graduating Ph.D. Students 2024!
May 30, 2024 Four of CREATE’s influential and productive doctoral students are graduating this spring. Please join us in congratulating Kelly Avery Mack, Emma McDonnell, Venkatesh Potluri, Ather Sharif, and Rachel Franz and wishing them well. Profiles With too many accomplishments amongst them to list here, these almost-minted Ph.D.s collaborated on projects that have contributed to CREATE’s growth and success. In addition to mentoring undergraduate students, publishing and presenting papers, and working in labs and with researchers, here are a…
CREATE Students Honored in Husky100
Two students selected for the 2024 Husky 100 exemplify CREATE’s mission to make technology accessible and make the world accessible through technology while involving people with lived disability experiences in their research. Kianna Bolante Ethan Gordon
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…
Zhang is CREATE’s Newest Apple AIML fellow
March 18, 2024 Congratulations to Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang – the most recent CREATE Ph.D. student to receive an Apple Scholars in AIML PhD fellowship. The prestigious award supports students through funding, internship opportunities, and mentorship with an Apple researcher. Zhang is a 3rd-year iSchool Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Jacob. O Wobbrock. His research focuses on using human-AI interactions to address real-world accessibility problems. He is particularly interested in designing and evaluating intelligent assistive technologies to make creativity tasks accessible….
Three Myths and Three Actions: “Accommodating” Disabled Students
CREATE Ph.D. students Kelly Avery Mack and Ather Sharif, along with Lucille Njoo, share three common myths about students with disabilities. They reveal the reality of their inequitable experience as grad students at UW, and propose a few potential solutions to begin ameliorating this reality, both at our university and beyond.
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,…
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. …
Accessible Technology Research Showcase – Spring 2023
June 30, 2023 In June 2023, CREATE and HuskyADAPT co-hosted a showcase — and celebration — of outstanding UW research on accessible technology. The showcase featured poster presentations, live demonstrations by our faculty, students, and researchers and was altogether vibrant and exciting. Over 100 attendees viewed 25 projects, presentations, and posters. Congratulations and appreciation to CREATE Engagement and Partnerships Manager Kathleen Quin Voss and HuskyADAPT Student Executive Chair Mia Hoffman for putting on an amazing research showcase! Read Project Descriptions Accessible card…
CREATE’s Newest Ph.D Graduates
June 9, 2023 We’re proud to see these talented, passionate students receive their Ph.D.s and excited to see how they continue their work in accessibility. Alyssa Spomer, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering Current: Clinical Scientist at Gillette Children’s Hospital, leading research in the Gillette Rehabilitation Department to improve healthcare outcomes for children with complex movement conditions. Elijah Kuska, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering Plans: Elija will start as an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines in the Mechanical Engineering Department in January…
CREATE Ph.D. Student Emma McDonnell Wins Dennis Lang Award
June 6, 2023 Congratulations to Emma McDonnell on receiving a Dennis Lang Award from the UW Disability Studies program! McDonnell, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Human Centered Design & Engineering, is advised by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater. McDonnell’s research focuses on accessible communication technologies and explores how these tools could be designed to engage non-disabled people in making their communication approaches more accessible. She has studied how real-time captioning is used during videoconferencing and her current work is…