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.
CREATE faculty bring multiple perspectives including technology design and engineering, and also disability rights and advocacy. CREATE founders have garnered 4 career-level awards: AAAS Fellow (Ladner), ACM Fellow (Wobbrock), ASSETS 10-year lasting impact award (Mankoff), and ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award (Mankoff).
Some of CREATE’s high-impact research emphasizes:
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
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
Mobile Device 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
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 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! Papers A Virtual Reality Scene Taxonomy: Identifying and Designing Accessible Scene-Viewing Techniques Rachel L. Franz, UW Information School (iSchool); Sasa Junuzovic, Microsoft;…
Empowering users with disabilities through customized interfaces for assistive robots
March 15, 2024 For people with severe physical limitations such as quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate personal assistant robots could bring a life-enhancing level of independence and self-determination. Allen School Ph.D. candidate Vinitha Ranganeni and her advisor, CREATE faculty member Maya Cakmak, have been working to understand and meet the needs of users of assistive…
ARTennis attempts to help low vision players
December 16, 2023 People with low vision (LV) have had fewer options for physical activity, particularly in competitive sports such as tennis and soccer that involve fast, continuously moving elements such as balls and players. A group of researchers from CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich's Makeability Lab hopes to overcome this challenge by enabling…
Winter 2023 CREATE Research Showcase
December 12, 2023 Students from CSE 493 and additional CREATE researchers shared their work at the December 2023 CREATE Research Showcase. The event was well attended by CREATE students, faculty, and community partners. Projects included, for example: an analysis of the accessibility of transit stations and a tool to aid navigation within transit stations; an…
UW News: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals
November, 2023 Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a…