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Category: student_news

CREATE Leadership at ASSETS’22 Conference

ASSETS 2022 logo, composed of a PCB-style Parthenon outline with three people standing and communicating with each other in the Parthenon, representing three main iconic disabilities: blind, mobility impaired, deaf and hard of hearing.

CREATE Associate Director Jon Froehlich was the General Chair for ASSETS’22, the premier ACM conference for research on the design, evaluation, use, and education related to computing for people with disabilities and older adults. This year, over 300 participants from 37 countries engaged with state-of-the-art research in the design and evaluation of technology for people with disabilities. UW CREATE was a proud sponsor of ASSETS’22. Keynote speaker Haben Girma is the first Deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School and a…

Community Day & Research Showcase 2022

CREATE’s 2nd Annual Community Day was well attended with 100 registered participants and presenters. We’re pleased with the show of strong community, the return to in-person (and also virtual) panel discussions, and a research showcase of 14 project teams. This year’s panels addressed the disproportionate impact of access to assistive technology on children with disabilities in BIPOC and immigrant communities as well as the issues that arise with the intersection of accessibility and biometric technologies. We were honored to host…

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…

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…

Ph.D. student Ather Sharif targets personalized design, visualizations, ableism

Media sites offer digital graphics for important information such as election polling data, stock market trends, and COVID-19, excluding many users. CREATE Ph.D. student Ather Sharif‘s research on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) focuses on designing data visualizations to be accessible by people with low vision or who are blind. “We have built a world where people who are blind or have low vision are unable to… participate in the financial world or polling information. We have built technology where we have…

Grad student Kelly Mack receives a Dennis Lang award

Kelly Mack, a young white woman with wavy brownish hair, smiles for the camera. She wears a blue floral blouse.

Kelly Mack, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science and mentored by CREATE Founding Co-Director Jen Mankoff, received a Dennis Lang Award from the UW Disabilities Studies program and the following praise: “Kelly is dedicated to improving accessibility for disabled students at UW through her research, service, and mentoring and allyship. Her thesis work will examine communication between DRS, students, and other stakeholders, and develop a prototype to allow tracking of DRS requests for improved accountability.” This award honors Dennis Lang,…