March 4, 2025
CREATE has initiated Coffee Chats – one or two opportunities per month for conversation among faculty, student, staff, and industry and community partners.
Topics have included opportunities for student involvement in CREATE, how researchers can benefit from community-engaged research, and where to find funding for research. These meetings have proved useful for sharing ideas, experiences, and information.
Future Coffee Chats
UW students and faculty, make sure you’re subscribed to either the CREATE Students or CREATE Faculty internal mailing list. Also, subscribe to the CREATE event calendar.
For accessibility info, contact Dr. Olivia Banner, CREATE’s Director of Strategy and Operations.
Community-engaged research
This Winter quarter, two coffee chats centered on community-engaged research.
Communicating with research participants: Community partner visit
On February 26, Kathleen Voss introduced Kimberly Meck from the Disability Empowerment Center (DEC), one of our community partners. The center supports independent living for people with a variety of – and often multiple – disabilities. Members of the DEC community have been recruited to participate in CREATE research. Meck noted that, while initial recruitment materials shared with them have not always been accessible, usable, or understandable by community members, Voss’s work as CREATE’s Community Engagement and Partnerships Manager has resulted in significant improvement in accessibility.
Meck had this advice for working with communities such as DEC:
Recruitment requests need to be specific and explained in plain language, at a sixth-grade level.
For example, recruitment materials often ask if people use “accessibility tools,” but a better way to ask this would be to use specific examples of the kinds of tools. That is, a blind/low vision user might not think of JAWS as an “accessibility tool;” they may think of it as what they use to read web content. Rather than using terms such as “artificial intelligence” and “GAI,” use concrete examples such as “ChatGPT” and “Claude.” Even if people know the term “AI,” they may not know when they’re using AI content. This also applies to language about what participants will be doing. For example, instead of asking people to “participate in a panel discussion,” rephrase that to “talk to a few people about your experiences.”
Tailor your materials to the audience.
Would a video be better to explain a project? Folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities might best comprehend the information through short videos, which must include all other access features such as transcripts of audio, CART, subtitles, and sign language interpreters. Other people can’t process images; for them, materials with too many pictures are hard to use. Consider the audience’s age range and disability when choosing a medium and your language.
Know your audience.
Know your audience’s disability, and know if they’re likely to have multiple disabilities. From Meck’s perspective, the best way to do that is to already be engaged and interacting directly with the people whose needs you’re trying to address.
A researcher’s perspective: Postdoctoral workshop
Meck’s visit followed a February 12 conversation between Jazette Johnson, a CREATE postdoctoral scholar, and Mark Baldwin, Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology at California State University, Los Angeles. Their discussion showcased key principles for undertaking community-engaged research.
Meet Jazette Johnson
A 2025 CREATE postdoctoral fellow, Jazette Johnson’s research explores the impact of AI-generated images, particularly persuasive and difficult-to-detect misinformation, on adults and elders with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She was a 2020 Microsoft Ada Lovelace Fellow and a 2019 Newkirk Community Based Research Fellow.
Researchers need to understand the needs of the community.
Baldwin drew on his graduate research about how to make outrigger canoes accessible to people with mobility challenges. He often worked on prototypes not in the lab but in the field, where he engaged deeply with people as they were getting in and out of canoes. Baldwin gained feedback, examples of challenges, and even assistance with fabrication. Through this on-site and collaborative work with the community in question, Baldwin developed a deep understanding of the needs of the community.
Johnson has observed different approaches to community-based research, including how researchers begin to build connections and trust within an organization, as well as how projects are formed either for the community or with the community. She documented her observations and outlined steps for deeper engagement in a blog as a third-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Informatics at the University of California – Irvine.
During their discussion, both Johnson and Baldwin emphasized that research needs to be sustainable, maintained, and beneficial to the community. They highlighted the importance of being clear with the community about process and outcomes, including these core questions:
- What will the process be like?
- What happens when you’re done with your research/paper?
- What good will participation do for the community?
In his case, Baldwin left 3D prototypes with the community, a form of direct benefit. And the organization’s director appreciates being mentioned in Baldwin’s publications, since it adds to credibility with prospective donors.
Both Johnson and Baldwin, like Meck, recommend deeper engagement with partner communities. “Volunteer with the organization, attend their events, and invite others to attend as well,” said Baldwin. Their final advice:
Consider how much you’re taking from the organization and make sure you’re giving more.
One way to boost your community partner: share their events and fundraisers with the CREATE community. Contact Liz Diether-Martin, CREATE’s Digital Content Developer, with details.
These events were organized by CREATE staff, and we particularly wish to thank Kathleen Voss for her efforts to inaugurate a once-per-quarter workshop/meeting with a CREATE community partner. Voss is always working to strengthen the collaborative ties between the CREATE research community and CREATE’s community partners, and these two events highlighted the importance of her role.
CREATE Funding Opportunities
In January, we had a conversation on the various grants and funds offered by CREATE, led by Mark Harniss, CREATE Director for Education and an associate professor in Rehabilitation Medicine, and Dr. Olivia Banner, CREATE Director of Strategy and Operations. CREATE funds are described in detail on our website, but the event offered the opportunity to ask questions and also support in a year when the funding landscape is changing.
Our Resources for Disabled Academics page also lists funding sources such as scholarships, fellowships, and grants.
Visits with Shaun Kane and Hrovje Benko
We also held two coffee chats with industry affiliates, where they met with Ph.D. students in discussions about research.
Shaun Kane is a research scientist in Responsible AI at Google Research. His research leverages HCI, AI, and machine learning to support equality, independence, health, and creativity for people with disabilities. Kane is also an Associate Professor in the departments of Computer Science and Information Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Hrovje Benko is a Director of Research Science at Meta Reality Labs Research where he is developing novel interactions, devices and interfaces for Contextualized AI, Augmented and Virtual Reality. He currently leads a multi-disciplinary organization that includes scientists and engineers with expertise in human computer interaction, computer vision, machine learning, AI, design, neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
Panel discussion: Being disabled on the job market
Banner led a panel of faculty and students in a discussion about being a person with a disability (PWD) on the job market. Topics included navigating issues around disclosing or not disclosing a disability and what information to include throughout the job search process and in job market materials.