CREATE faculty, students, and partners collaborate on exciting breakthroughs in accessible technology—advancing inclusion and participation for people with disabilities.
We focus on enabling people with disabilities to be part of the creation process, giving people with disabilities the education, voice, inspiration, and opportunity to enter and move through their education and into professional settings.
This inclusive approach helps realize the disability mantra “nothing about us without us” as we pursue our ultimate goal: creating an inclusive and accessible world.
Energetic production and leadership
During the 2022-23 academic year:
- CREATE researchers published 52 papers on accessibility. Six of those won awards and two won SIGCHI dissertation awards.
- CREATE’s high-impact research in accessible technology and experiences included making 2-D visual content such as slides and visualizations accessible to blind people, automating large-scale mobile app accessibility analyses and repairs, mapping sidewalk and indoor accessibility, and studying the impacts of COVID-19 on students with disabilities.
- CREATE and I-LABS continued their collaboration on the impact of access to mobility aids on early childhood development.
Some of CREATE’s high-impact research emphasizes:
AI and Machine Learning Research
AI has enormous potential to support needs and ways of being for people with disabilities. CREATE researchers are thoughtfully exploring AI’s implications for people with disabilities so they are included in the development and use of AI products and so they are protected from AI biases. Active research projects are addressing ableism, communication tools, health and activities of daily living, physical spaces and fabrication, digital accessibility and visualization, and interaction support.
More about AI and Machine Learning Research at CREATE
Early Access and the Brain
How do early experiences with mobility technology impact brain development and learning outcomes? CREATE is partnering with UW I-LABS to answer this and other questions. This joint work will demonstrate that early access to mobility technology is a critical asset for development and learning and also contributes to CREATE’s goal of understanding and addressing historical perceptions of disability and assistive technology, which often serve to perpetuate exclusion despite legislation protecting individuals’ rights to mobility and technology.
Ongoing collaborations with Go Baby Go and HuskyAdapt are providing early childhood access to accessibility tools.
More about Early Access and the Brain Research at CREATE
Mobile Device and Desktop Accessibility
Mobile apps have become a key feature of everyday life, with apps for banking, work, entertainment, communication, transportation, and education, to name a few. But many apps remain inaccessible to people with disabilities who use screen readers or other assistive technologies. CREATE is working to support automated diagnosis and repair of mobile app accessibility failures for all mobile apps. CREATE faculty are also exploring other aspects of mobile app accessibility, such as creating better touch screens based on how people with disabilities actually interact.
Collected at scale accessibility data from 312 apps over 16 months
Conducted qualitative accessibility evaluation of 30 popular Android educational games
100,000 downloads of the Pointing Magnifier, a desktop pointing aid that makes the mouse easier to use for people with limited fine motor function
Mobility, Indoors and Outdoors
Mobility is a precursor to community living and engagement and is a critical equity issue. Project Sidewalk, which uses deep learning and crowdsourcing to identify inaccessible sidewalks, and Open Sidewalks, which collects the data to provide routing directions to pedestrians personalized to their unique disability needs, are deployed in cities around the world, and have directly impacted not only pedestrians but also city governments and policies.
20 cities engaged in improving pedestrian access
1 million labels for sidewalks provided by users
More than 10 mapathons in the past year
Physical Computing for Accessibility
Physical computing, the combination of consumer-grade fabrication and computing technology, enables participation for people with disabilities in multiple home and community contexts. Now widely available, physical computing technology includes 3D-modeling software and machines such as laser cutters, 3D-printers, knitting machines and programmable embroidery machines. These technologies are already making a demonstrable and significant impact on community living and participation for people with disabilities in the form of 3D-printed tactile maps, customized tactile interactions on devices, specialized tools for creating assistive technology.
Through a NIDILRR ARRT on Physical Computing in Community Living and Participation grant, we are training postdoctoral fellows to be leaders in rehabilitation research who can harness advances in physical computing and fabrication to enhance community living and participation with people
with disabilities.
Access, Equity and Inclusion
CREATE’s work includes efforts to improve data equity. Examples include our commentary on disability bias in biometrics; an autoethnographic study to test AI tools’ utility for accessibility; and development of a blocks-based language accessible to students with disabilities. A recent CREATE seminar focused on the intersection of race and disability, which has led to a new initiative, Race, Disability & Technology.
RESEARCH NEWS
CREATE researchers find ChatGPT biased against resumes that imply disability, models improvement
June 24, 2024 While seeking research internships last year, CREATE Ph.D. student Kate Glazko noticed recruiters posting online that they’d used OpenAI's ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence tools to summarize resumes and rank candidates. Advised by co-author and CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff in the Allen School, Glazko studies how generative AI can replicate and amplify real-world…
Breaking Barriers with an Emotion Translator: A Glimpse into the Future of Communication
June 20, 2024 Autistic individuals can face difficulty navigating social and emotional interactions, leading to exclusion, misunderstandings, and stress. CREATE faculty member Annuska Zolyomi presented research at CHI 2024 that seeks to tackle these difficulties through a novel approach. Zolyomi, an assistant professor of Computing & Software Systems at UW Bothell, and co-author Jaime Snyder, an Associate Professor at…
Anat Caspi speaks at White House panel on AI in Transportation
June 17, 2024 CREATE associate director Anat Caspi spoke on ‘Mapping, Visualizing, and Building the Future’ as part of a White House panel on AI in Transportation. Focused on developing a national transportation infrastructure observatory and an accompanying application ecosystem, the panel gathered innovators in transportation, aiming to align end users, researchers, entrepreneurs, and federal…
Congrats to CREATE's Graduating Ph.D. Students 2024!
May 30, 2024 Four of CREATE's influential and productive doctoral students are graduating this spring. Please join us in congratulating Kelly Avery Mack, Emma McDonnell, Venkatesh Potluri, Ather Sharif, and Rachel Franz and wishing them well. Profiles Kelly Avery Mack Kelly Avery Mack received their Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science…
CREATE Papers and Presentations at CHI 2024
This is a work in progress as there are many papers and presentations from CREATE researchers at CHI 2024, the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. We appreciate your patience! For a list of all papers from UW researchers, see DUB's roundoup. Papers A Virtual Reality Scene Taxonomy: Identifying and Designing Accessible…
More information:
- UW Tacoma’s commencement ceremony is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 7, at the Tacoma Dome and will be streamed live here. Doors open 60 minutes in advance.
- The June 8 Commencement ceremony in Seattle will be streamed online starting at 12:30 p.m. Doors to Husky Stadium open at 12:30 p.m. “Purple Carpet” programming begins at 12:30 p.m., followed by the procession of graduates at 1:30 p.m. and the Commencement ceremony at about 2 p.m.
- UW Bothell will host the 33rd annual Commencement Ceremony at 11:45 a.m. Sunday, June 9, at T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Doors open one hour prior to the ceremony. A Graduate Hooding Ceremony will take place Saturday, June 8, on the UW Bothell sports field.
Physical computing, the combination of consumer-grade fabrication and computing technology, enables participation for people with disabilities in multiple home and community contexts. Now widely available, physical computing technology includes 3D-modeling software and machines such as laser cutters, 3D-printers, knitting machines and programmable embroidery machines. These technologies are already making a demonstrable and significant impact on community living and participation for people with disabilities in the form of 3D-printed tactile maps, customized tactile interactions on devices, specialized tools for creating assistive technology.
Through a NIDILRR ARRT on Physical Computing in Community Living and Participation grant, we are training postdoctoral fellows to be leaders in rehabilitation research who can harness advances in physical computing and fabrication to enhance community living and participation with people
with disabilities.