April 21, 2026
In April, the CREATE Accessibility Seminar welcomed three new(-ish) CREATE faculty members to share their research interests in accessibility, disability studies, and disability-related fields.
The faculty members
Dr. Cecilia Aragon is the director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab and a professor emeritus in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE). She has worked in data science, software development, aviation, sociotechnical systems, and accessible computing-related work. She was a co-PI of AccessAdvance until its federal funding was lost in 2025.
Dr. Wanda Pratt is a professor in the Information School and an adjunct professor at the UW Medical School Division of Biomedical & Health Informatics. Her work focuses on health informatics, with a long-term interest at the intersection of health informatics and accessibility, particularly in how people’s health conditions can create accessibility needs.
Dr. Rania Hussein is a teaching professor in Electrical & Computer Engineering, teaching Computing & Networking and Data Science. Her research focuses on embedded systems, digital twinning, remote engineering, medical image analysis, and engineering education. She has led several non-profits to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Common threads in the conversation are the need for funding, the desire for connection and collaboration, and the need to involve people with disabilities in research and testing. CREATE can help with that! We shared the following resources:
- Visit CREATE Community Partners Program to learn about support for community-based research offered by CREATE.
- See Research Funding from CREATE for an overview of funding offered by CREATE.
- Find Resources and Funding for Disabled Academics for external funding sources.
- Join to the CREATE Mailing List for announcements of news, events and opportunities
- Join Tuesday Tinkering to experiment and discuss the design and fabrication of accessible technology
The conversation was led by Gina Clepper, a Ph.D. student in Human Centered Design and Engineering and student co-lead of the CREATE Accessibility Seminar.
Cecilia Aragon
Dr. Cecilia Aragon is the director of the Human-Centered Data Science Lab and a professor emeritus in Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE). She has worked in data science, software development, aviation, sociotechnical systems, and accessible computing-related work. She was a co-PI of AccessAdvance until its federal funding was lost in 2025.
Dr. Aragon shared that one of her new research interests combines her background in human-centered data science and artificial intelligence with her lived experience as a faculty member with a disability and her commitment to equity.
“Most studies focus on single tools in isolation and most concentrate on visual or hearing disabilities,” said Aragon. She emphasized that those are important, but we need more studies with people with upper limb motor impairments and the ecosystem of accessibility tools.
Last year, she and her Ph.D. student, Sourojit Ghosh, presented a case study at the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium (HCIC) conference based on Aragon’s experience with chronic hand pain. Her work has always been keyboard-centric: writing code, sending emails, writing proposals, etc. She has tried various tools and many new tools have been recommended, but none were tested on people who don’t type or use a mouse. Some she could not even install without the use of a keyboard or mouse.
Aragon has had success with generative AI (GAI) tools for building tools and macros. She envisions a human-centered approach where AI serves as an aid, where one could say, “I can’t use this app. Design some macros for Dragon Naturally Speaking that enable me to use this map tool without using my fingers.”
Wanda Pratt
Dr. Wanda Pratt says that while it’s common for people’s health conditions to create temporary or short-term accessibility needs, these needs have often been neglected by both the health informatics community and, to some extent, by the accessibility community as well. She has observed that accessibility tools are often designed for long-term or permanent accessibility needs, neglecting the short-term issues and needs in particular health settings.
In a project, called “Patients as Safeguards,” her team looked at ways that hospitalized patients could participate in promoting their own health and safety. Many of the patients, however, had substantial accessibility needs, such as coming out of surgery with temporary cognitive issues, mobility limitations, or inability to use their voices. The patients could not effectively communicate and be part of their own safety team. These issues have not been considered in the hospital ecosystem.
“Like Cecilia, my work focuses on really understanding people’s needs from their lived experience and developing tools and technologies only once we have a real deep understanding of those perspectives,” said Pratt. Pratt also shares experience as a programmer with the loss of use of a hand due to a repetitive strain injury.
More recently, Pratt has worked with Dr. Emma McDonell, a CREATE Ph.D. graduate in HCDE and currently a postdoctoral fellow at TU Wien in Vienna, Austria. They sought to understand the perspective of people with chronic health conditions and how those conditions created accessibility needs. They’ve worked on co-design studies and have a paper at the American Medical Informatics Association Conference. Another paper is underway for the ASSETS conference: a description of the kinds of needs that people have expressed and their co-designs for how they envision technology can assist them.
Further work focuses on people’s ability to trust the healthcare system when they have been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons. Pratt has seen some unique accessibility concerns when people are temporarily unable to make decisions for themselves or are forced to undergo treatments and chemical or physical restraints. Her research looks at how patients can express their own values and needs in such a way that can be used by the healthcare system in general.
Socio-technical issues in healthcare culture
Pratt was asked, based on her own work in the different spaces of accessible computing and health informatics, what these research communities can offer to each other.
“I think they have a lot to learn from each other. The health informatics community has deep knowledge of how the healthcare system works and what works in a hospital setting. But few in accessible computing have a real knowledge of that setting,” Pratt answered.
“Also the flip is true,” she added. “Accessible computing knows what kinds of tools and technologies could be useful for people with accessibility needs, while clinicians are pretty oblivious to a lot of those things.”
Pratt said she has had conversations with McDonnell and CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff about how the clinician’s goal is to cure people, not to discover devices like a foot mouse or other accessibility technology that can help when a cure is not possible or immediate.
“That shows a lack of disability justice perspective and a lack of support for someone who cannot use their hands, can’t hear, or who may not want certain medical interventions,” said Pratt.
“Sometimes the accessibility/disability justice perspective does not understand the importance of addressing accessibility needs to improve a person’s chronic condition or to reduce their pain,” Pratt said. “Not simply to accept things the way they are, but to find a mix of getting better and finding ways to better interact with the world – right now and in the future as things change,” she reiterated.
Rania Hussein
During the pandemic, Dr. Rania Hussein started the Remote Hub Lab to provide students remote access to hardware to complete their assignments and get the same quality of education from a distance. The lab provided access to the hardware through a camera. Students could send in their code and see the output, such as how the circuit should be working remotely.
When in-person attendance became possible for most students, the lab shifted to investigating how to promote engagement for non-traditional students who may not be able to come to the lab or are not physically available to read their assignments.
Opportunities for collaboration and testing
In a new project named Redtail, Hussein is combining digital twinning with remote experimentation. She is now looking for students and other users with disabilities to test.
A back-burnered project is a prototype for a low-cost tool to teach coding to kids with visual impairments. It’s a redevelopment of Microsoft’s Code Jumper focusing on lower-cost hardware.
Hussein invites collaborators to help figure out how coding education can be made accessible for students with disabilities. Dr. Mankoff noted that there are really interesting industry people coming to Tuesday Tinkering who work in the hardware and physical computing space, including Tom Ball, a key figure in the development and educational rollout of the BBC micro:bit for teaching kids to code.