Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is held in May each year to get everyone talking, thinking, and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than 1,000,000,000 people with disabilities.
UW GAAD 2026
CREATE collaborated with UW departments and offices, including UW Public Lectures and UW Accessible Technology Services, to co-host speaker Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown as part of the UW’s 2026 GAAD events.
Zhǎngsūn Brown explored the promises and failures of regulating automation, algorithmic assessment, and generative AI through a framework of disability justice and crip feminist technoscience.
Watch for CREATE offerings next spring.
Past CREATE GAAD sessions
Best Practices for Accessible Presentations
CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff kicks off the midday events, including a presentation by CREATE participating postdocs Emma McDonnell and Avery Mack. Dr. Mack shares best practices for accessible presentations. Dr. McDonnell covers basic disability studies history and concepts, important grounding for any kind of work with people with disabilities.
Interdisciplinary Computing Instructors Workshop featuring keynote by Professor Amy Ko (Zoom)
CREATE faculty member Kevin Lin hosts a 90-minute, Zoom-only workshop designed for instructors in all disciplines – the humanities, arts, and sciences – who teach courses involving computing, programming, or data analysis. Amy Ko, also a CREATE faculty member, delivers the keynote, followed by interactive tutorials and breakout sessions for one-on-ones and networking.
Evening Book talk with Joshua Miele
CREATE collaborator and MacArthur award winner Joshua Miele will talk about his new memoir, Connecting Dots. This evening event, held in the Gates/CSE2 Bezos Seminar Room G04, is also free. Registration is required.
In his book, Dr. Miele shares his unique approaches to solving accessibility challenges, such as automated tools for generating tactile maps, a somewhat shady scheme for crowd-sourcing descriptions of YouTube videos, and a brief but brutal sabotage campaign against inaccessible ATMs in the late 90s.
In collaboration with veteran journalist Wendell Jamieson, Miele tells the story of his personal and professional blind life. From Brooklyn to Berkeley, from childhood to parenthood, from student to scholar, and beyond, Connecting Dots describes Miele’s experience growing up, coming of age, and establishing a life and career as a blind person in a sighted world. He offers his professional take on widely-shared challenges of blindness, such as access to maps and graphics, access to video content, and the challenge of managing uninvited “assistance” from sighted strangers.