Accessibility-Related UW Courses

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 Katherine M. Steele. She describes herself as an upper-extremity enthusiast. From orthotic and prosthetic devices to virtual rehabilitation techniques, she is interested in fusing engineering and medical fields to develop solutions that would improve the quality of live of individuals with upper-limb disabilities.

"Research. A lot of research."

Portnova said that the goal of the postdoctoral fellowship is to train leaders in rehabilitation research and to harness advances in physical computing and fabrication. Postdocs participate in research, coursework, mentoring, and physical computing tools for rehabilitation applications. "You design your project from scratch... you see it come through every step of the process."

And though she chuckled at the idea of taking courses again, she noted that instead of the huge course load of a Ph.D. student, she took targeted courses to enhance her education and experience. The mentoring experience was very helpful to prepare to be a principal investigator and ultimately feel more prepared to tackle the role as a faculty.

She also noted that, as an undergrad at the UW when CREATE was a brand new research center, she has enjoyed seeing the growth into a "big center" and a community working to improve the lives of people with disabilities.

Gears of Progress Podcast

Asked about the inspiration behind her podcast, Gears of Progress, Portnova emphasized the importance of scientific communication, mentorship, and the future of research in assistive technology. She first became interested in listening to podcasts as a new parent, wanting to be productive while her hands were busy. Since she loves talking about science and communicating about research to the general public, producing her own podcast was the next step. Her goal with Gears of Progress is to bring content out of the research journals to the rehabilitation specialists and, ultimately, to people with disabilities.

The Gears of Progress podcast is available on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox

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Mobile 3D printer can autonomously add accessibility features to a room

October 29, 2024

From accessibility upgrades to a custom cat-food bowl, a prototype mobile 3D printer is being used to change the built environment and tailor spaces for peoples’ needs or style preferences.

Built on a modified consumer vacuum robot, MobiPrint can automatically measure a room and print objects onto its floor to add accessibility features, home customizations, or artistic flourishes to the space. The prototype was built by a research team in the Makeability Lab. The team, led by CREATE Ph.D. student Daniel Campos Zamora and CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich, customized a graphic interface that lets users design objects that the robot has mapped out.

The team recently presented its work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Pittsburgh (UIST). Read their research paper, MobiPrint: A Mobile 3D Printer for Environment-Scale Design and Fabrication.

Pushing 3D printers to do more

Today’s 3D printers make it fairly easy to fabricate a chess set, for example. But these printers are largely fixed in place. So if someone wants to add 3D-printed elements to a room — a footrest beneath a desk, for instance — the project gets more difficult. A space must be measured. The objects must then get scaled, printed elsewhere and fixed in the right spot. Handheld 3D printers exist, but they lack accuracy and come with a learning curve.

"How can we push [digital fabrication] further and further into the world, and lower the barriers for people to use it? How can we change the built environment and tailor spaces for peoples' specific needs — for accessibility, for taste?"

--Daniel Campos Zamora, lead author and CREATE Ph.D. student in the Allen School

How it works

The prototype system can add accessibility features, such as tactile markers for blind and low-vision people. These might provide information, such as text telling conference attendees where to go, or warn of dangers such as staircases. Or it can create a ramp to cover an uneven flooring transition. MobiPrint also allows users to create custom objects, such as small art pieces up to three inches tall.

Before printing an object, MobiPrint autonomously roams an indoor space and uses LiDAR to map it. The team’s design tool then converts this map into an interactive canvas. The user then can select a model from the MobiPrint library — a cat food bowl, for instance — or upload a design. Next, the user picks a location on the map to print the object, working with the design interface to scale and position the job. Finally, the robot moves to the location and prints the object directly onto the floor.

For printing, the current design uses a bioplastic common in 3D printing called PLA. The researchers are working to have MobiPrint remove objects it’s printed and potentially recycle the plastic. They’re also interested in exploring the possibilities of robots that print on other surfaces (such as tabletops or walls), in other environments (such as outdoors), and with other materials (such as concrete).

"I think about kids out biking or my friends and family members who are in wheelchairs getting to the end of a sidewalk without a curb. It would be so great if in the future we could just send Daniel’s robot down the street and have it build a ramp."

--Jon E. Froehlich, Director of the Makeability Lab

Liang He, an assistant professor at Purdue University, who was a doctoral student in the Allen School while doing this research, is a co-author on this paper.

This article was excerpted from the UW News article by Stefan Milne and the MobiPrint project page.

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New Book: Teaching Accessible Computing

March 14, 2024

A new, free, and community-sourced online book helps Computer Science educators integrate accessibility topics into their classes. Teaching Accessibility provides the foundations of accessibility relevant to computer science teaching and then presents teaching methods for integrating those topics into course designs.

The editors are Alannah Oleson, a postdoctoral scholar and co-founder at the UW Center for Learning, Computing, and Imagination (LCI), CREATE and iSchool faculty Amy Ko, and Richard Ladner, CREATE Director of Education Emeritus. You may recognize many CREATE faculty members’ research referenced throughout the guide. CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff and CREATE Ph.D. student Avery Kelly Mack contributed a foundational chapter that advocates for teaching inclusively in addition to teaching about accessibility.

Letting the book speak for itself

"... we’ve designed this book as a free, open, living, web-first document. It’s free thanks to a National Science Foundation grant (NSF No. 2137312) that has funded our time to edit and publish the book. It’s open in that you can see and comment on the book at any time, creating community around its content. It’s living in that we expect it to regularly change and evolve as the community of people integrating accessibility into their CS courses grows and evolves. And it’s web-first in that the book is designed first and foremost as an accessible website to be read on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices, rather than as a print book or PDF. This ensures that everyone can read it, but also that it can be easily changed and updated as our understandings of how to teach accessibility in CS evolve."

Introduction by Alannah Oleson, Amy J. Ko, Richard Ladner

"To write these chapters, we recruited some of the world’s experts on accessible computing and teaching accessible computing, giving them a platform to share both their content knowledge about how accessibility intersects with specific CS topics, but also their pedagogical content knowledge about how to teach those intersections in CS courses."

Introduction by Alannah Oleson, Amy J. Ko, Richard Ladner

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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. 

RASSAR researchers envision the tool as an aid in the building and validation of new construction, planning renovations, or updating homes for health concerns, or for telehealth home visits with occupational therapists. UW News interviewed two CREATE Ph.D. students about their work on the project:

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Research at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility

October 13, 2023

What are the opportunities for research to engage the intersection of race and disability?

What is the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies?

Two CREATE Ph.D. students have explored these questions and found little focus on this intersection within accessibility research. In their paper, Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility (PDF), they observe that we’re missing out on the full nuance of marginalized and "otherized" groups. 

The Allen School Ph.D. students, Aashaka Desai and Aaleyah Lewis, and collaborators will present their findings at the ASSETS 2023 conference on Tuesday, October 24.

Spurred by the conversation at the Race, Disability & Technology research seminar earlier in the year, members of the team realized they lacked a framework for thinking about work at this intersection. In response, they assembled a larger team to conduct an analysis of existing work and research with accessibility research.

The resulting paper presents a review of considerations for engaging with race and disability in the research and education process. It offers analyses of exemplary papers, highlights opportunities for intersectional engagement, and presents a framework to explore race and disability research. Case studies exemplify engagement at this intersection throughout the course of research, in designs of socio-technical systems, and in education. 

   Case studies

• Representation in image descriptions: How to describe appearance, factoring preferences for self-descriptions of identity, concerns around misrepresentation by others, interest in knowing others’ appearance, and guidance for AI-generated image descriptions.
• Experiences of immigrants with disabilities: Cultural barriers that include cultural disconnects and levels of stigma about disability between refugees and host countries compound language barriers.
• Designing for intersectional, interdependent accessibility: How access practices as well as cultural and racial practices influence every stage of research design, method, and dissemination, in the context of work with communities of translators.

Authors

• Christina N. Harrington, Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon 
• Aashaka Desai, Ph.D. student in the Allen School, advised by Jennifer Mankoff and Richard Ladner
• Aaleyah Lewis, Ph.D. student in the Allen School, advised by James Fogarty
• Sanika Moharana, Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon
• Anne Spencer Ross, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University
• CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff

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