What risks do recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GAI) pose for people with disabilities? And what opportunities might they offer for improving accessibility? For some time now, CREATE researchers have been exploring these pressing questions. We are excited to announce that CREATE has been awarded a five-year, $4.6 million grant to advance this crucial research!
CREATE will be leading a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on participatory, assistive, inclusive, and responsible use of AI technology, funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR), a program of the Administration for Community Living, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The interdisciplinary team of researchers involved with this RERC come from the College of Engineering, the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, the Information School, Disability Studies, and Rehabilitation Medicine. Aligning with CREATE’s mission and vision, the CREATE-RERC projects will be guided, informed, and led by people with disabilities, toward the goal of creating accessible technologies.
Research projects
The CREATE-RERC research projects investigate bias, privacy, and security risks when GAI is used in assistive technology contexts and for accessibility, and they explore possibilities for addressing these risks. Both projects focus on multiply-marginalized people with disabilities. One research project collects the first-ever dataset about GAI’s inclusiveness and privacy and security risks. The other research project investigates the indirect risks for multiply-marginalized people with disabilities when GAI is used “on” them i.e., to rank their resumes. The project also explores methods that will allow people with disabilities to mitigate these risks.
Development projects
The development projects of the CREATE-RERC seek to place people with disabilities as full participants in the design of responsible AI and GAI. First, we will develop disability-led solutions for one of the biggest unmet needs in accessibility today: text simplification. Simply put, most documents are not accessible to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and current text-simplification efforts rely on the availability of people with text simplification expertise to check and validate the outputs.
“This award recognizes the research excellence that has defined CREATE since its inception four years ago. All members of our CREATE community—researchers, students, community partners, and industry partners—have contributed to putting CREATE at the front and center of efforts to advance accessible technologies. We are honored that NIDILRR has awarded CREATE, and by implication our community, the funding that supports our work ensuring that emerging technologies are accessible for everyone.”
Dr. Jennifer Mankoff, Director of CREATE and the Richard E. Ladner Professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Our first development project aims for on-demand, self-directed text simplification that can also allow for independent fact checking and validation. Second, we incorporate AI to improve the accessibility of the creativity tool crucial in white-collar work, slideshow creation. Our third development project allows people with disabilities to generate multiple fabricated variations on proven solutions for home adaptation. The fourth project collects open-source accessibility supports at a hub that is easy for the disability community to find and that is accessible to use, at a11yhood.org.
PI: Jennifer Mankoff, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering (College of Engineering)
Co-PI:Mark Harniss, Associate Professor, Rehabilitation Medicine (UW Medicine)
Other team members: Anat Caspi, Director of the Taskar Center (Allen School, College of Engineering), Jacob O. Wobbrock (Information School), Olivia Banner (CREATE Operations, Disability Studies Program), Joshua Miele (Amazon Lab126 Accessibility Research), Tony Fast (Distinguished Project Jupyter Contributor), Kathleen Voss (CREATE Community Engagement and Partnerships), Liz Diether-Martin (CREATE Digital Communications)
CREATE associate director Heather Feldner is leading research on the relationships between lived experiences of ableism, biases of healthcare providers, and both short- and long-term health outcomes.
The collaboration, including researchers from the UW Department of Rehabilitation, the UW iSchool, and the University of Pittsburgh, is funded by a 5-year, $3.2 million NIH R01 grant — the first funding of its kind from the NIH to support ableism and health disparity research.
"The long-term goal of this work is to reduce disparities and maximize participation, health, and quality of life in partnership with people with mobility disabilities. This work will leverage our team’s multidisciplinary expertise, lived experience of disability, and past work to fill a critical gap in understanding underlying mechanisms that perpetuate ableism in healthcare so that more effective bias-mitigating solutions may be developed and evaluated in the future."
In a mixed-methods study with 40 rehabilitation providers and over 400 people with mobility disabilities in Washington and Pennsylvania, the team will investigate the impacts of ableism on health outcomes of individuals with mobility disabilities. In addition, the team will conduct cutting-edge Natural Language Processing to conduct a retrospective chart analysis to detect patterns of potential bias in written provider documentation.
Ableism, the act of discrimination and social prejudice based on presumed or actual impairment and/or disability, is widespread in society, including healthcare. Multiple factors may contribute to ableism in healthcare — implicit and explicit biases of providers, lack of knowledge about disability, and inaccessible environments. But the mechanisms by which these factors affect the health outcomes of people with disabilities have not been widely explored. And while people with disabilities comprise 25% of the world’s population, they have only recently been recognized as a health disparities population.
Congratulations to CREATE Ph.D. student Reham Abuatiq, who has received the 2024 Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship, which will fully fund her for one quarter for her dissertation writing phase!
Advised by CREATE associate director Heather Feldner, Abuatiq's dissertation work explores the Healthcare Transition of Middle Eastern Youth with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and their Families. Using both qualitative and participatory methods, her research goals are to:
Understand the current healthcare access and transition landscape from the perspectives of Middle Eastern young adults with disabilities and their caregivers.
Investigate the relationships between healthcare access and transition and the quality of life for Middle Eastern young adults with disabilities.
Co-create culturally appropriate healthcare transition strategies and resources in the Arabic language.
Abuatiq is currently working with one of CREATE's community partners, Open Doors for Multicultural Families (ODMF), which provides grassroots community-based services and supports for immigrants and refugees in the WA area living with disabilities. ODMF plans to host a photo exhibition in autumn 2024 featuring the photo narratives that the families participating in Reham's study will have completed.
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.
Kelly Avery Mack received their Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Advised by CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff, their research focuses on representation of people with disabilities in digital technologies like avatars and generative AI tools. They recently have investigated how technology can support people with fluctuating access needs, like neurodiverse people and people with chronic or mental health conditions.
Mack has been an invaluable resource at CREATE, co-leading graduate seminars, presenting workshops on accessibility, and contributing to CREATE’s accessibility research. “CREATE has been a great place to meet other accessibility researchers and get in contact with disabled people in our community,” says Mack. “As someone who tries to align my researchers with community needs and desires, this connection to the Seattle disability community is invaluable.”
Mack, whose thesis is titled, Dissertation Title: Understanding, Designing, and Building Adaptable Technology for Fluctuating Accessibility Needs in Group Settings, is on the job market, interested in a research scientist position in industry.
Earning her Ph.D. from Human Centered Design and Engineering, Emma McDonnell is advised by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater. McDonnell’s research blends computer science, design, and disability studies to explore ways that technology can be designed to align with disability politics and social worlds.
Her dissertation research explores how communication technology, specifically captioning, could be redesigned to encourage mixed ability groups to take a collective approach to accessibility. Along with CREATE associate directors Leah Findlater and Jon Froehlich, McDonnell studied captioning practices on TikTok and offered steps toward a standard for user-generated captioning. With fellow Ph.D. student, McDonnell presented a workshop on accessible presentations for CREATE’s GAAD Day 2024, contextualizing the importance of accessibility within the longer history of disability discrimination and activism.
Looking ahead
McDonnell is interested in postdoctoral opportunities to continue exploring new possibilities for technology design anchored in critical disability perspectives.
Advised by CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Venkatesh Potluri’s research examines accessibility barriers experienced by blind or visually impaired (BVI) developers participating in professional programming domains such as user interface design, data science, and physical computing. His work contributes real-world systems to improve developer tools and new interaction techniques to address these access barriers. His thesis is titled, A Paradigm Shift in Nonvisual Programming.
While at the UW, Potluri has been selected as an Apple Scholar and a Google Lime Scholar, and contributed to the Accessibility Guide for Data Science and STEM Classes. He presented a paper on a large-scale analysis of the accessibility of Jupyter notebooks, a new tool that enables blind and visually impaired people to create their own data visualizations to explore streaming data.
Asked about his experience with CREATE, Potluri responded, "Since CREATE's founding, I've been thrilled by its mission to take a holistic approach to accessibility with disabled experts and stakeholders—from education to research to translation. I'm grateful to have been part of this beacon of high-quality research informed by a deep understanding of disability. I aspire to carry the torch forward and help make the world accessible!"
Future plans
Potluri will join the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in the Information School in Fall 2024.
Graduating with a Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Ather Sharif is co-advised by CREATE faculty Katharina Reinecke and CREATE associate director Jacob O. Wobbrock. Sharif’s research on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) focuses on making online data visualizations accessible to screen-reader users. He pioneered the first-of-its-kind system, VoxLens, that utilizes voice assistants for screen-reader users to extract information from online data visualizations. He also created UnlockedMaps, an open-data map that assists users with mobility disabilities to make informed decisions regarding their commute.
Sharif has garnered many awards while at the UW, including:
Sharif credits CREATE leaders, who include his advisors as well as Richard Ladner, Jennifer Mankoff, and Anat Caspi, to name a few, “who are not only prominent allies for disabled people but are always willing to advise and guide students to be the best researchers they can be.”
“I cannot begin to express how incredible it is to have CREATE as part of our ecosystem,” says Ather. “It advances the state of accessible technologies for people with disabilities through cutting-edge research. Personally, as someone with a disability, it means the world to me. As a researcher, CREATE has funded almost all of my research work at UW.”
After graduation, Sharif will be traveling on a 2024 UW Bonderman Fellowship. He plans to visit Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Costa Rica, Japan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Thailand to learn about disability rights history and distinct physical infrastructure for wheelchair users and enhance his perspectives, challenge his viewpoints, and identify real-life barriers disabled people face.
Graduating with a Ph.D. from the iSchool, Rachel Franz is advised by CREATE associate director Jacob O. Wobbrock. Franz' research thesis was titled, Supporting the Design, Selection, and Evaluation of Accessible Interaction Techniques for Virtual Reality.
A 2021 Apple Scholar in AI/ML, Franz' work seeks to improve accessibility in virtual reality (VR) technology. “My goal is to eventually design a recommender system that recommends interaction techniques based on people’s abilities, their preferences, [and] possibly the structure of the virtual environment,” Franz said upon receiving the award. Specifically, she is focused on using AI to make virtual reality more accessible to individuals with mobility limitations.
“I couldn't have found my participants without CREATE! It has been essential for connecting me with community partners, particularly the Here and Now Project,” says Franz.
Franz will be an assistant professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) starting in November.
With too many accomplishments amongst them to list here, these almost-minted Ph.D.s collaborated on projects that have contributed to CREATE's growth and success. In addition to mentoring undergraduate students, publishing and presenting papers, and working in labs and with researchers, here are a few of the ways Sharif, Potluri, McDonnell and Mack have worked together:
Potluri and Mack also co-led 5 CREATE Accessibility Seminars to discuss relevant reading and share accessibility research.
Mack and Ather Sharif collaborated with Lucille Njoo to dispel common myths about students with disabilities in an article in the Winter 2024 Allen School DEIA newsletter.
McDonnell and Mack presented an accessible presentations workshop as part of UW's 2024 Global Accessibility Awareness Day celebration.
Graduating with a Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, Ather Sharif is co-advised by CREATE faculty Katharina Reinecke and CREATE associate director Jacob O. Wobbrock. Sharif’s research on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) focuses on making online data visualizations accessible to screen-reader users. He pioneered the first-of-its-kind system, VoxLens, that utilizes voice assistants for screen-reader users to extract information from online data visualizations. He also created UnlockedMaps, an open-data map that assists users with mobility disabilities to make informed decisions regarding their commute.
