Faculty and Alumni win awards at ASSETS 2021

Congrats to the many accessibility leaders from CREATE and UW who won awards at ASSETS 2021.

Co-authored by Jennifer Mankoff (a founding co-director of CREATE), Gillian R. Hayes and Devva Kasnitz in 2010, the paper, Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology, has been awarded the 2021 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award at the virtual 2021 ASSETS Conference. This award is given to a “significant innovation or contribution to knowledge that has proved influential” over at least a decade. The paper was cited for groundbreaking and influential work on bridging the gap between the assistive technology research field and the field of disability studies.

The Best Paper Award went to Qisheng Li, Josephine Lee, Christina Zhang and CREATE faculty member Katharina Reinecke for How Online Tests contribute to support systems for people with cognitive and mental disabilities.

The Best Artifact Award went to a UW team Lucy Wang, Isabel Cachola, Jonathan Bragg, Evie Cheng, Chelsea Haupt, Matt Lazke, Bailey Kuehl, Madeleine van Zuylen, Linda Wagner and Daniel Weld for making academic papers accessible through scia11y.

A runner up for Best Artifact Award was Sidewalk Gallery, by Michael Duan, Aroosh Kumar, Mikey Saugstad, Aileen Zeng, Ilia Savin and CREATE Associate Director Jon E. Froehlich. Sidewalk Gallery is an interactive, filterable gallery of over 600,000 crowdsourced sidewalk accessibility images across seven cities in two countries (US and Mexico). It includes five primary accessibility problem types, 35 tag categories, and a 5-point severity scale.

Best paper nominations also went to students Kelly Mack; Venkatesh Potluri; Dhruv Jain; and Erin Beneteau for their paper Mixed abilities and varied experiences: a group auto-ethnography of a virtual summer internship and Kelly Mack for her paper Designing Tools for High-Quality Alt Text Authoring.

Finally, the Best Student Paper Award went to a team including CREATE Alumnus Cynthia Bennett and UW Alumnus Jeffrey P. Bigham for their work on Aided Nonverbal Communication through Physical Expressive Objects

Congrats to all!


Previous ASSETS paper awards for CREATE faculty

CREATE faculty also had many successes at ASSETS 2020 and ASSETS 2019 including:

Best student paper (2020):  
Living Disability Theory: Reflections on Access, Research, and Design
Megan Hofmann, Devva Kasnitz, Jennifer Mankoff, Cynthia L Bennett

Best paper (2020):
Input Accessibility: A Large Dataset and Summary Analysis of Age, Motor Ability and Input Performance 
Leah Findlater, Lotus Zhang

Best Artifact (2020):

SoundWatch
Dhruv Jain, Hung Ngo, Pratyush Patel, Steven Goodman, Leah Findlater, Jon Froehlich

Paper Impact Award (2019):
Slide rule: making mobile touch screens accessible to blind people using multi-touch interaction techniques
Jacob Wobbrock