Harniss’ professional background lies in special education and instructional technology, but his current focus revolves around knowledge translation, assistive technology, accessible information technology (IT), and disability law and policy.
In his role as CREATE Director for Education, Mark aims to foster collaboration and cooperation between UW “upper and lower campus,” particularly by forging connections between CREATE, the Disability Studies Program, the Institute on Human Development and Disability (IHDD), and the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. Additionally, he intends to expand CREATE’s reach by establishing links with important external communities, ensuring that the innovations generated within CREATE are available to these communities. In turn, he envisions that these communities will provide valuable insights to CREATE researchers regarding their specific needs.
The CREATE community thanks three of our founding leaders for their energy and service in launching the center as we embark upon some transitions. “CREATE would not be where it is today without the vision, passion, and commitment that Jake, Richard, and Anat brought to their work leading the center,” says CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff.
Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock: From vision, to launch, to sustainable leadership
It was back in June 2019 that Jacob O. Wobbrock, CREATE’s founding Co-Director, was on a panel discussion at Microsoft’s IdeaGen 2030 event, where he talked about ability-based design. Also on that panel was future CREATE Associate Director Kat Steele. After the event, the two talked with Microsoft Research colleagues, particularly Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris, about the possibility of founding an accessible technology research center at the University of Washington.
Wobbrock and Steele thought that a center could bring faculty together and make them more than the sum of their parts. Within a few months, Wobbrock returned to Microsoft with Jennifer Mankoff, Richard Ladner, and Anat Caspi to pitch Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, on the idea of supporting the new Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). With additional support from Microsoft President Brad Smith, and input from Morris, the center was launched by Smith and UW President Ana Marie Cauce at Microsoft’s Ability Summit in Spring 2020.
Wobbrock, along with Mankoff, served as CREATE’s inaugural co-directors until June 2023, when Wobbrock stepped down into an associate director role, with Mankoff leading CREATE as sole Director. “I’m a founder by nature,” Wobbrock said. “I helped start DUB, the MHCI+D degree, a startup called AnswerDash, and then CREATE. I really enjoy establishing new organizations and seeing them take flight. Now that CREATE is soaring, it’s time for more capable hands than mine to pilot the plane. Jennifer Mankoff is one of the best, most capable, energetic, and visionary leaders I know. She will take CREATE into its next chapter and I can’t wait to see what she does.” Wobbrock will still be very active with the center.
Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner, one of CREATE’s founders and our inaugural Education Director
We thank Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner for three years of leadership as one of our founders and CREATE’s inaugural Education Director. Ladner initiated the CREATE Student Minigrant Program that helps fund small grants up to $2,000 in support of student initiated research projects.
Ladner has shepherded 10 minigrants and worked directly with eight Teach Access Study Away students. Through his AccessComputing program, he helped fund several summer research internships for undergraduate students working with CREATE faculty. All CREATE faculty contribute to accessibility related education in their courses, where he provides encouragement.
Anat Caspi defined and elevated CREATE’s translation efforts, leveraging the center’s relationships with partners in industry, disability communities, and academia. Her leadership created sustainable models for translation and built on our prior successes. Collaborations with the TASKAR center, HuskyADAPT, and the UW Disability Studies Program have ensured diverse voices to inform innovation.
Director of Translation duties will be distributed across Mankoff, CREATE’s Community Engagement and Partnerships Manager Kathleen Quin Voss, and the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, which Caspi directs.
Led by Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) Ph.D. candidate Emma McDonnell and supported by CREATE, this work investigates how groups with both hearing and d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) members could be better supported when using captions during videoconferences.
Researchers recruited four groups to participate in a series of codesign sessions, which de-centers researchers’ priorities and seeks to empower participants to lead the development of new design ideas. In the study, participants reflected on their experiences using captioning, sketched and discussed their ideas for technology that could help build accessible group norms, and then critiqued video prototypes researchers created of their ideas.
One major finding from this research is that participants’ relationships with each other shape what kinds of accessibility support the group would benefit from.
For example, one group that participated in our study were cousins who had been close since childhood. Now in their mid-twenties, they found they did not have to actively plan for accessibility; they had their ways of communicating and would stop and clarify if things broke down. On the other hand, a group of colleagues who work on technology for DHH people had many explicit norms they used to ensure communication accessibility. One participant, Blake, noted,“I was pretty emotional after the first meeting because it was just so inclusive.” These different approaches demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to communication accessibility – people work together as a group to develop an approach that works for them.
This paper also contributes new priorities for the design of videoconferencing software. Participants focused on designing add-ons to videoconferencing systems that would better support their group in communicating accessibly. Their designs fell into four categories:
Speaker Identity and Overlap: Having video conferencing tools identify speakers and warn groups when multiple people speak at once, since overlapping speech can’t be captioned accurately. Participants found this to be critical, and often missing, information.
Support for Behavioral Feedback: Building in ways for people to subtly notify conversation partners if they need to adjust their behavior. Participants desired tools to flag when people need to adjust their cameras, critical caption errors, and if speech rate gets too high. They considered, but decided against, a general purpose conversation breakdown warning.
Videoconferencing Infrastructure for Accessibility: Adding more features and configurable settings around conversational accessibility to videoconferencing platforms. Participants desired basic controls, such as color and font size, as well as the ability to preset and share group accessibility norms and customize behavior feedback tools.
Sound Information: Providing more information about the sound happening during a conversation. Participants were excited about building sound recognition into captioning tools, and considered conveying speech volume via font weight, but decided it would be overwhelming and ambiguous.
This research also has implications for broader captioning and videoconferencing design. While often captioning tools are designed for individual d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, researchers argue that we should design for the entire group having a conversation. This shift in focus revealed many ways that, on top of transcribing a conversation, technology could help groups communicate in ways that can be more effectively captioned. Many of these tools are easy to build with current technology, such as being able to click on a confusing caption to request clarification. The research team hopes that their work can illuminate the need to pay attention to groups’ social context when studying captioning and can provide videoconferencing platform designers a design approach to better support groups with mixed hearing abilities.
McDonnell is advised by CREATE Associate Directors Leah Findlater, HCDE, and Jon Froehlich, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center.
The purpose of this program is to identify and promote adoption of innovative and equitable evidence-based policy and practice solutions to help public and private sector employers of all sizes recruit, hire, retain, and advance people with disabilities, including those from historically underserved communities.
The entity awarded the EARN cooperative agreement will conduct research that values the perspectives of historically underserved groups, conduct policy analysis to identify and validate effective disability-inclusive policy and practice models, translate that knowledge into engaging tools for employers and intermediary organizations, and provide technical assistance and training to help employers of all sizes, both public and private, create inclusive workplace cultures that support high-quality employment of people with disabilities.
Current: Clinical Scientist at Gillette Children’s Hospital, leading research in the Gillette Rehabilitation Department to improve healthcare outcomes for children with complex movement conditions.
Elijah Kuska, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: In Silico Techniques to Improve Understanding of Gait in Cerebral Palsy
Dual Ph.D.s in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Math
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Plans: Megan will join the UW AI Institute as a postdoc in Spring of 2023 to pursue clinical translation of her methods to evaluate digital biomarkers to support health and function from wearable data.
Nicole Zaino, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: Walking and rolling: Evaluating technology to support multimodal mobility for individuals with disabilities
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, 2018 – Present
Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship, University of Washington, 2022
Best Paper Award at the European Society of Movement Analysis for Adults and Children, 2019.
Finalist, International Society of Biomechanics David Winter Young Investigator Award, 2019
Plans: Nicole is headed to Bozeman Montana to join the Crosscut Elite Training team to work toward joining the national paralympic nordic ski team for Milano-Cortina 2026, while working part-time with academia and industry partners.
Ricky Zhang
Dissertation: Pedestrian Path Network Mapping and Assessment with Scalable Machine Learning Approaches
Advisors: Anat Caspi and Linda Shapiro
Plans: Ricky will be a postdoc in Bill Howe’s lab at the University of Washington.
Kat Steele, who has been busy advising four out of five of these new PH.D.s, noted, “We have an amazing crew of graduate students continuing and expanding upon much of this work. We’re excited for new collaborations and translating these methods into the clinic and community.”
Congratulations to Emma McDonnell on receiving a Dennis Lang Award from the UW Disability Studies program! McDonnell, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Human Centered Design & Engineering, is advised by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater.
McDonnell’s research focuses on accessible communication technologies and explores how these tools could be designed to engage non-disabled people in making their communication approaches more accessible. She has studied how real-time captioning is used during videoconferencing and her current work is exploring how people caption their TikTok videos.
The Dennis Lang Award recognizes undergraduate or graduate students across the UW who demonstrate academic excellence in disability studies and a commitment to social justice issues as they relate to people with disabilities.
A team of Allen School robotics researchers has published a paper on the finer aspects of robot-assisted dining with friends. “A meal should be memorable, and not for a potential faux pas from the machine,” notes co-author Patrícia Alves-Oliveira. Supported by a CREATE Student minigrant and in the spirit of “nothing about us without us,” they are working with the Tyler Schrenk Foundation to address the design of robot-assisted feeding systems that facilitate meaningful social dining experiences.
The University of Washington’s Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) seeks a Director of Strategy and Operations to join our team as a key leader to help steward this new multidisciplinary center that involves faculty from multiple units across campus.
Working in close collaboration with the Center’s Faculty Leadership Team, the Director of Strategy and Operations will have the overall responsibility of developing and overseeing organizational strategy, designing and implementing a diverse array of programs, enabling the successful execution of center operations, and helping to ensure a sustainable trajectory of high quality work in service of the Center’s core mission, which is ‘To make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology’.
CREATE, launched Spring 2020, is a collaborative effort that brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners across disciplines including computer science, engineering, rehabilitation medicine, and information sciences. Located at the University of Washington, a world-class research university, and embedded within the local community in the Pacific Northwest, this new Center is leading programs that span research, education, translation, advocacy and outreach.
This is a rare and unusual opportunity to join a community of scholars and leaders ready to help change the face of accessibility for people with disabilities. Our center addresses critical access issues throughout peoples’ lifespan and across all spheres of life. Our ideal candidate is a passionate leader and communicator with a track record of successfully growing and operating an organization. Further, the candidate possesses demonstrated experience managing and leading people, including the ability to develop and empower top-notch staff and promote a positive, inclusive and accessible culture that values societal impact and social change. This is a relatively new center, and the successful candidate is someone who excels at helping the faculty co-founders execute their vision and build a successful culture and operations.
Reporting directly to the Center Directors and working closely with other Center staff, the Director of Strategy and Operations will support CREATE’s Faculty Leadership team and Associate Directors, serving as chief administrator for all the Center’s daily operations and programs. The Director of Strategy and Operations will supervise, support and work closely with several direct reports, including a Finance Administrator, Community Manager, and Communication Manager. The Director of Strategy and Operations will also be a resource for CREATE’s diverse community of faculty affiliates, visiting professors, post docs, and students.
In CREATE, there is an expectation that all faculty and staff will step up where they see an opportunity to apply their special expertise or talents, speak up when they identify opportunities or concerns, and lead by taking actions that exemplify CREATE’s core values, including accessibility and inclusion. Individuals with disabilities and other intersectional and underrepresented backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. Applicants are encouraged to specify any access needs that can be of help during the application/interview process.
IMPACT TO THE UNIVERSITY
Research outputs from and activities of CREATE will help grow and advance the field of accessibility, addressing key aspects of who is included in society, and who can use the technologies that are becoming increasingly critical in today’s world. Our goal is to make sure that people with disabilities are represented as both stakeholders and leaders in all aspects of the work necessary to achieve our mission. This will continue to establish the University of Washington as the leading research institution both nationally and internationally in this field.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of three years of administrative and strategic management experience, including financial and budgetary oversight and at least two years of direct professional staff supervision.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of internal and external constituents.
Ability to build a successful organizational culture and develop comprehensive internal processes.
Strategically minded, analytical leader.
Discreet facilitator and problem solver with a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Autonomous self-starter with intellectual confidence and flexibility and ability to effectively manage multiple demands and priorities.
Demonstrate a high degree of initiative-taking, problem solving capability, creativity, and capacity for innovative thinking.
Proficiency in developing budgets, fiscal monitoring and financial projections using multiple fund sources.
Strong technology skills and inclination to adapt and learn new technologies.
Demonstrated success in working with diverse populations, including people with disabilities.
Knowledge of best practices for accessibility and inclusivity in all aspects of center work from documents that are produced to meeting practices and interpersonal engagement.
DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS
Advanced degree preferred.
Experience in a large-scale, complex academic institution.
A passion for the Center’s mission: To make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.
The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center. The Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion (EARN) helps employers, human resources professionals, and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility staff find the resources they need to recruit, hire, retain and advance people with disabilities.
EARN’s work has received several awards, particularly for its popular Inclusion@Work Framework, a seven-part guide for building a disability-inclusive workplace.
The U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) aims to increase the number and quality of employment opportunities for people with disabilities by developing and influencing policies and practices.
Undergrads, a 10-week summer research position is available with an interdisciplinary team led by CREATE associate directors Kat Steele, Heather Felder, and CREATE faculty member Kim Ingraham. The student researcher will study how early access to powered mobility experiences can impact toddlers with disabilities across developmental, movement, and language domains.
To apply, email your resumé/CV and a paragraph explaining your interest in the position, plus any other relevant information to Kim Ingraham.
While playing card games, individuals with motor disabilities or limited hand and finger use experience a lack of confidentiality, frustration having to depend on a caregiver, and difficulty connecting with other players. Our team aims to create a simple, universal, user-friendly, and affordable device that allows individuals with motor disabilities to independently hold and play cards.
Our idea is to incorporate switch-scanning technology in a device that can hold up to twelve cards and allow the user to dispense a chosen card to other players at the click of a switch. The device has a universal jack to accommodate users' own switches.
In order to provide a comfortable bike-riding experience to a child with hemiplegia, our mission is to create seat, handlebar, and stability modifications to a commercially available bicycle. This allows for cycling without the need for external assistance.
Early self-initiated mobility is fundamental to a young child’s development. Adapted ride-on cars (ROCs) are an affordable alternative mobility option for young children with disabilities. We will be investigating the impact that control types has on a child’s directional control and engagement during play using ROCs that are joystick-controlled and manually steered.
Current ROCs depend on manual steering, which results in steering being difficult for a young child, especially with limited motor function. Modifications for ROCs that allow for joystick control are now becoming available, allowing the child to use a joystick for steering. We will be investigating the impact that control types has on a child’s directional control and engagement during play using ROCs that are joystick-controlled and manually steered. To quantify the child’s device interaction, we have developed a custom data logger, the ROC+, using an Ardunio Nano 33 IoT. The data logger measures switch activation for the traditional ROC, steering wheel rotation or joystick position, wheel rotation, acceleration, and angular velocity. We can also measure when an adult has taken control of the device using a remote control. The ROC+ will be used in a forthcoming study to quantify a child’s driving ability and the relationship between a parent and a child while a child is learning to use a powered mobility device.
Blocks4All: A screen reader and switch accessible block-based programming environment
Blocks4All is a block-based programming environment for all children including those with disabilities. It is accessible with VoiceOver, Switch Control, and Voice Control. Children can learn beginning programming concepts by placing blocks on the app to control the Dash robot.
Chronically Under-Addressed: Considerations for HCI Accessibility Practice with Chronically Ill People
Accessible design and technology could support the large and growing group of people with chronic illnesses. However, human computer interactions (HCI) has largely approached people with chronic illnesses through a lens of medical tracking or treatment rather than accessibility. We describe and demonstrate a framework for designing technology in ways that center the chronically ill experience.
First, we identify guiding tenets: 1) treating chronically ill people not as patients but as people with access needs and expertise, 2) recognizing the way that variable ability shapes accessibility considerations, and 3) adopting a theoretical understanding of chronic illness that attends to the body. We then illustrate these tenets through autoethnographic case studies of two chronically ill authors using technology. Finally, we discuss implications for technology design, including designing for consequence-based accessibility, considering how to engage care communities, and how HCI research can engage chronically ill participants in research.
Cultivating inclusive play and maker mindset among neurodiverse children in a preschool classroom
Young neurodivergent children need equitable opportunities to co-engage in high quality learning activities alongside neurotypical peers from early childhood. While there has been critical movement toward increasing participation of neurodivergent children in classrooms, much of this work involve school-age kids (6 years or over), leaving open questions around how neurodivergent preschoolers of age 3-5 years might engage in collaborative play with and around technologies.
We aim to understand whether and how programmable toy robots (e.g., KIBO) can foster inclusive play and maker mindset among neurodiverse children in preschool classrooms.
We partnered with the Experimental Education Unit (EEU) at the UW Haring Center. We conducted our research in two preschool classrooms, each including 16 children between the ages of 3-5. Six to eight children in each classroom have neurodevelopmental conditions including autism, developmental delays, and speech difficulties. Our research activities center around supporting children in making and interacting with the toy robot called KIBO. Preliminary findings show that through careful and accessible adaptation of activities, KIBO could enhance understanding of cause of effect, trial and error, enthusiasm for making and imagination, and sense of collaboration (and at times competition and negotiation) among neurodiverse groups of children.
Design Principles for Robot-Assisted Feeding in Social Contexts
Social dining is a meaningful and culturally significant experience. For 1.8 million Americans with motor impairments who cannot eat without assistance, challenges restrict them from enjoying this social ritual. In this work, we identify the needs of participants with motor impairments during social dining and how robot-assisted feeding can address them.
Following a community-based participatory research method, we worked with a community researcher with motor impairments throughout this study. We contribute (a) insights into how a robot can help overcome challenges in social dining and (b) design principles for creating robot-assisted feeding systems to facilitate meaningful social dining.
Easier or Harder, Depending on Who the Hearing Person Is”: Codesigning Videoconferencing Tools for Small Groups with Mixed Hearing Status
With improvements in automated speech recognition and increased use of videoconferencing, real-time captioning has changed significantly. This shift toward broadly available but less accurate captioning invites exploration of the role hearing conversation partners play in shaping the accessibility of a conversation to d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) captioning users.
While recent work has explored DHH individuals’ videoconferencing experiences with captioning, we focus on established groups’ current practices and priorities for future tools to support more accessible online conversations.
Our study consists of three codesign sessions, conducted with four groups (17 participants total, 10 DHH, 7 hearing). We found that established groups crafted social accessibility norms that met their relational contexts. We also identify promising directions for future captioning design, including the need to standardize speaker identification and customization, opportunities to provide behavioral feedback during a conversation, and ways that videoconferencing platforms could enable groups to set and share norms.
The Effect of Increased Sensory Feedback from Neuromodulation and Exoskeleton use on Ankle Co-contraction in Children with Cerebral Palsy
Children with cerebral palsy (CP) have altered gait that limits mobility through the activation of antagonistic muscle pairs simultaneously. This study will quantify changes in muscle co-contraction during walking with two devices that increase sensory feedback.
Children with cerebral palsy (CP) have altered gait that limits mobility. One hallmark of CP gait is increased muscle co-contraction, or the activation of antagonistic muscle pairs at the same time.This may contribute to increased energy expenditure and reduced physical activity for children with CP. Amplifying sensory feedback may help combat this by prompting more refined motor control and lead to reduced co-contraction with CP. The purpose of this study is to quantify changes in muscle co-contraction during walking with two devices that increase sensory feedback: an ankle exoskeleton with audiovisual feedback (Exo) and transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation (tSCS). The Exo provides increased haptic feedback targeting external sensory information while tSCS boost neural communication internally. We hypothesized that co-contraction would decrease when walking with spinal stimulation and the ankle exoskeleton. We compared changes in co-contraction of the biceps femoris and rectus femoris (BF/RF) and the tibialis anterior and soleus (TA/Sol) with 1) no devices, 2) Exo only, 3) tSCS only, and 4) Exo+tSCS for 5 children with CP. We found that tSCS only led to the greatest reduction in TA/Sol co-contraction but Exo only and Exo+tSCS led to the greatest reductions in BF/RF co-contraction. This work is fundamental in helping us understand how children with CP respond within a single session of using these devices and how the devices might be used for longer term rehabilitation.
The Effects of Weakness, Contracture, and Altered Control on Walking Energetics During Crouch Gait
Cerebral palsy (CP) is the result of a pediatric brain injury that primarily alters control. However, individuals with CP often develop progressive, secondary impairments like weakness and contracture. Multi-modal impairments-that of control and morphology-impose complex restrictions on mobility and elevate energetics. This study seeks to utilize modeling, simulation, and machine learning to parse the relative effects of multi-modal impairments during non-disabled and CP gait, identifying the primary impairment driving elevated energetics.
Evaluating Customization of Remote Tele-operation Interfaces for Assistive Robots
Mobile manipulator platforms, like the Stretch RE1 robot, make the promise of in-home robotic assistance feasible. For people with severe physical limitations, like those with quadriplegia, the ability to tele-operate these robots themselves means that they can perform physical tasks they cannot otherwise do themselves, thereby increasing their level of independence.
In order for users with physical limitations to operate these robots, their interfaces must be accessible and cater to the specific needs of all users. As physical limitations vary amongst users, it is difficult to make a single interface that will accommodate all users. Instead, such interfaces should be customizable to each individual user.
In this work we explore the value of customization of a browser-based interface for tele-operating the Stretch RE1 robot. More specifically, we evaluate the usability and effectiveness of a customized interface in comparison to the default interface configurations from prior work. We present a user study involving participants with motor impairments (N=10) and without motor impairments, who could serve as a caregiver, (N=13) that use the robot to perform mobile manipulation tasks in a real kitchen environment.
Our study demonstrates that no single interface configuration satisfies all users' needs and preferences. Users perform better when using the customized interface for navigation, but not for manipulation due to higher complexity of learning to manipulate through the robot. All participants are able to use the robot to complete all tasks and participants with motor impairments believe that having the robot in their home would make them more independent.
Exploring Virtual Whiteboard Sessions in Mixed Hearing Environments
Traditional ideation processes have been challenged due to current hybrid work environments and reliance on telecommunication tools. Our sponsor, Microsoft Teams, offers a platform for collaborative work, including brainstorming with whiteboards. However, these virtual sessions pose accessibility issues for D/deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals. This project aims to address the challenges faced by DHH users of Microsoft Teams Whiteboard during remote meetings and develop a solution to enhance inclusivity and accessibility.
The student engineers on this team will redesign a joystick control modification to a ride-on car for young children as well as develop an easy-to-follow assembly manual in order to make it easier for the GoBabyGo volunteers to assemble.
How Do People with Limited Movement Personalize Upper-Body Gestures?
Biosignal interfaces that use electromyography sensors, accelerometers, and other biosignals as inputs provide promise to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. However, generalized models that are not personalized to the individual’s abilities, body sizes, and skin tones may not perform well. Individualized interfaces that are personalized to the individual and their abilities could significantly enhance accessibility.
In this work, I discuss how personalized electromyography gesture interfaces can be personalized to each user's abilities and characterize personalized gestures for 25 participants with upper-body motor impairments. As biosignal interfaces become more commonly available, it is important to ensure that such interfaces have high performance across a wide spectrum of users.
The current switch kit has concerns regarding accessibility, safety, and durability. Our project seeks to modify and enhance a switch kit that enables children with disabilities to engage in collaborative play, providing a safe, enjoyable, and inclusive experience for all.
Our mission is to design an accessible solution that will accommodate diverse needs and encourage inclusivity, in addition to co-creating other educational models to establish an equitable learning environment for students with and without disabilities at the Experimental Education Unit, an inclusive early childhood school community associated with the University of Washington. We focused on creating an interactive sensory mat for children to play “Floor is Lava,” encouraging them to further develop their gross motor skills and play collaboratively.
Notably Inaccessible – Understanding Data Science Notebook (In)Accessibility
Computational notebooks, tools that facilitate storytelling through exploration, data analysis, and information visualization, have become the widely accepted standard in the data science community both in academia and industry. While there is extensive research that investigates how data scientists use these notebooks, identifies their pain points, and enables collaborative data science practices, very little is known about the various accessibility barriers experienced by blind and visually impaired (BVI) notebook users.
We present findings from a large scale analysis of 100K Jupyter notebooks, showing that BVI notebook users may experience accessibility barriers due to authoring practices, data representations in these notebooks, and the incapability of tools and infrastructures that are used to work with these notebooks. we make recommendations to improve accessibility of the artifacts of a notebook, suggest authoring practices, and propose changes to infrastructure to make notebooks accessible.
A Pilot Study of Sidewalk Equity in Seattle Using Crowdsourced Sidewalk Assessment Data
We examine the potential of using large-scale open crowdsourced sidewalk data from Project Sidewalk to study the distribution and condition of sidewalks in Seattle, WA. While potentially noisier than professionally gathered sidewalk datasets, crowdsourced data enables large, cross-regional studies that would be otherwise expensive and difficult to manage.
As an initial case study, we examine spatial patterns of sidewalk quality in Seattle and their relationship to racial diversity, income level, built density, and transit modes. We close with a reflection on our approach, key limitations, and opportunities for future work.
Quantifying device and environment exploration during powered mobility use in toddlers
Toddlers with mobility disabilities and delays require the use of technology to access self-initiated mobility at an early age which is critical for development, mobility, and social interaction. My work is on investigating the toddler-device-environment relationship and interaction for toddlers learning how to navigate and explore with a pediatric powered mobility device (Permobil Explorer Mini).
Our mission is to create a towing device that significantly improves the Seattle Adaptive Sports Center’s basketball athletes’ ability to transport their sports chair using their daily chair.
Steering Modifications to Support On-time Powered Mobility Use
Adapted ride-on cars are a great mobility learning tool for young kids with disabilities, but they can be hard to steer. We have created 3D-printed steering modifications to make it easier for a child to turn the steering wheel using different modalities.
Toward Open and Shared Pedestrian Path Network Mapping and Assessment at Scale
Manual mapping of pedestrian path networks is often a challenging task due to the substantial data requirements and potential errors. In response, we’ve developed AI-powered automated tools that integrate diverse types of globally-available data for proactive generation and analysis of pedestrian path and network data, with a keen focus on accessibility considerations. The resulting pedestrian path network data is represented in a standardized format per the OpenSidewalks data schema, making it readily usable in downstream routing and analytic applications.
Our mission is to create a viable wireless switch that is more affordable than commercially available switches and is adapted to increase accessibility in any situation.
Classification of light rail stations using semantic segmentation
UW CREATE collaborates toward a world with fewer problems and more solutions for people of all abilities.
The UW College of Engineering showcased CREATE’s mission, moonshots, and collaborative successes in a feature article, Rethinking disability and advancing access, written by Alice Skipton. The article is reproduced and reformatted here.
CREATE researchers and partners work on high-impact projects — such as those focused on mobility and on mobile device accessibility — advancing the inclusion and participation for people with disabilities.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in four people in the United States lives with a disability.
“The presence of disability is everywhere. But how disability has been constructed, as an individual problem that needs to be fixed, leads to exclusion and discrimination.”
Heather Feldner, UW Medicine assistant professor in Rehabilitation Medicine and a CREATE associate director
The construct also ignores the reality that people’s physical and mental abilities continually change. Examples include pregnancy, childbirth, illness, injuries, accidents and aging. Additionally, assuming that people all move, think or communicate in a certain way fails to recognize diverse bodies and minds. By ignoring this reality, technology and access solutions have traditionally been limited and limiting.
UW CREATE, a practical, applied research center, exists to counter this problem by making technology accessible and the world accessible through technology. Launched in early 2020 with support from Microsoft, the Center connects research to industry and the community.
On campus, it brings together accessibility experts and work-in-progress from across engineering, medicine, disability studies, computer science, information science and more, with the model always open to new collaborators.
“Anyone interested in working in the area of accessible technology is invited to become part of CREATE,” says Jacob O. Wobbrock, a professor in the UW Information School and one of the founders and co-director of the Center.
Shooting for the moon
CREATE is partnering with UW I-LABS to explore how accessibility impacts young children’s development, identity and agency. Their study uses the only powered mobility device available in the U.S. designed for children one to three years old. Photo courtesy of UW CREATE.
“We have an amazing critical mass at UW of faculty doing accessibility research,” says Jennifer Mankoff, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and another founder and co-director of CREATE. “There’s also a lot of cross-talk with Microsoft, other technology leaders, and local and national community groups. CREATE wants to ensure people joining the workforce know about accessibility and technology and that the work they do while they are at UW directly and positively impacts the disability community.” The Center’s community and corporate partnerships approach increases creativity and real-world impact.
The concept of moonshots — technology breakthroughs resulting from advances in space exploration — offers a captivating way of thinking about the potential of CREATE’s research. The Center currently has four research moonshots for addressing technological accessibility problems. One focuses on how accessibility impacts young children’s development, identity and agency and includes a mobility and learning study with the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) that employs the only powered mobility device available in the U.S. market specifically designed for children one to three years old. Another looks more broadly at mobility indoors and outdoors, such as sidewalk and transit accessibility. A third seeks ways to make mobile and wearable devices more accessible along with the apps people use every day to access such essentials as banking, gaming, transportation and more. A fourth works toward addressing access, equity and inclusion for multiply marginalized people.
“CREATE wants to ensure people joining the workforce know about accessibility and technology and that the work they do while they are at UW directly and positively impacts the disability community.”
— Jennifer Mankoff, founder and co-director of CREATE
For CREATE, advancing these moonshots isn’t just about areas where technologies already exist, like improving an interface to meet more people’s needs. It’s about asking questions and pushing research to address larger issues and inequities. “In certain spaces, disabled people are overrepresented, like in the unhoused or prison populations, or in health-care settings,” Mankoff says. “In others, they are underrepresented, such as in higher education, or simply overlooked. For example, disabled people are more likely to die in disaster situations because disaster response plans often don’t include them. We need to ask how technology contributes to these problems and how it can be part of the solution.”
Broader problem-solving abilities
For even greater impact, CREATE has situated these research moonshots within a practical framework for change that involves education initiatives, translation work and research funding. Seminars, conversations, courses, clubs and internship opportunities all advance the knowledge and expertise of the next generation of accessibility leaders. Translation work ensures that ideas get shaped and brought to life by community stakeholders and through collaborations with UW entities like the TASKAR Center for Accessible Technology, HuskyADAPT and the UW Disability Studies Program, as well as through collaborations with industry leaders like Microsoft, Google and Meta. CREATE’s research funding adds momentum by supporting education, translation and direct involvement of people with disabilities.
Engineering and computer science researchers seek to make digital wayfinding more equitable and accessible to more people.
Nicole Zaino, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student participating in CREATE’s early childhood mobility technology research, describes the immense benefits of having her education situated in the context of CREATE. “It’s broadened my research and made me a better engineer,” she says. She talks about the critical importance of end-user expertise, like the families participating in the mobility and learning study. Doing collaborative research and taking classes in other disciplines gives her more insights into intersecting issues. That knowledge and new vocabulary inform her work because she can search out research from different fields she otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
More equity advocates
At the same time, Zaino’s lived experience with her disability also broadens her perspective and enhances her research. She became interested in her current field when testing out new leg braces and seeing other assistive technology on the shelves at the clinic. For Mankoff, it was the reverse. She worked in the field and then experienced disability when diagnosed with Lyme disease, something she’s incorporated into her research. Wobbrock got a front-row seat to mobility and accessibility challenges when he severely herniated his L5-S1 disc and couldn’t sit down for two years. For Feldner, although she studied disability academically as a physical therapist and in disability studies, first-hand experiences came later in her career when she became a disability advocate for one of her children and a parent. At CREATE, more than 50% of those involved have some lived experience with disability. This strengthens the Center by bringing a diversity of perspectives and first-hand knowledge about how assumptions often get in the way of progress.
Seeking to push progress further on campus, CREATE has an initiative on research at the intersection of race, disability and technology with the Allen School, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Population Health Initiative, the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Office of the ADA Coordinator.
CDC statistics show that the number of people experiencing a disability is higher when examined through the lens of race and ethnicity. With events and an open call for proposals, the initiative seeks increased research and institutional action in higher education, health care, artificial intelligence, biased institutions and more.
“If we anticipate that people don’t conform to certain ability assumptions, we can think ahead,” says Wobbrock. “What would that mean for a particular technology design? It’s a longstanding tenant of accessibility research that better access for some people results in better access for all people.”
Make a gift
By supporting UW CREATE, you can help make technology accessible and make the world accessible through technology.
Just about everybody in business, education, and artistic settings needs to use presentation software like Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Adobe Illustrator. These tools use artboards to hold objects such as text, shapes, images, and diagrams. But for blind and low vision (BLV) people, using such software adds a new level of challenge beyond keeping our bullet points short and images meaningful. They experience:
High added cognitive load
Difficulty determining relationships between objects
Uncertainty if an operation has been successful
Screen readers, which were built for 1-D text information, don’t handle 2-D information spaces like artboards well.
For example, NVDA and Windows Narrator would only report artboard objects in their Z-order – regardless of where those objects are located or whether they are visually overlapping – and only report its shape name without any other useful information.
Can digital artboards in presentation software be made accessible for blind and low-vision users to read and edit on their own?
Can we design interaction techniques to deliver rich 2-D information to screen reader users?
The answer is yes!
They developed a multidevice, multimodal interaction system – A11yBoard – to mirror the desktop’s canvas on a mobile touchscreen device, and enabled rapid finger-driven screen reading via touch, gesture, and speech.
Blind and low-vision users can explore the artboard by using a “reading finger” to move across objects and receive audio tone feedback. They can also use a second finger to “split-tap” on the screen to receive detailed information and select this object for further interactions.
“Walkie-talkie mode,” when turned on by dwelling a finger on the screen like turning on a switch, lets users “talk” to the application.
Users can therefore access tons of details and properties of objects and their relationships. For example, they can ask for a number of closest objects to understand what objects are near to explore. As for some operations that are not easily manipulable using touch, gesture, and speech, we also designed an intelligent keyboard search interface to let blind and low-vision users perform all object-related tasks possible.
Through a series of evaluations with blind users, A11yBoard was shown to provide intuitive spatial reasoning, multimodal access to objects’ properties and relationships, and eyes-free reading and editing experience of 2-D objects.
Currently, much digital content has been made accessible for blind and low-vision people to read and “digest.” But few technologies have been introduced to make the creation process accessible to them so that blind and low-vision users can create visual content on their own. With A11yBoard, we have gained a step towards a bigger goal – to make heavily visual-based content creation accessible to blind and low-vision people.
Paper author Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang is a second-year Ph.D. student at the UW iSchool. His work in HCI and accessibility focuses on designing assistive technologies for blind and low-vision people. Zhang has published and presented at CHI, UIST, and ASSETS conferences, receiving a CHI best paper honorable mention award, a UIST best poster honorable mention award, and a CHI Student Research Competition Winner, and featured by Microsoft New Future of Work Report 2022. He is advised by CREATE Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock.
The machines and devices we use every day – for example, touch screens, gas pedals, and computer track pads – interpret our actions and intentions via sensors. But these sensors are designed based on assumptions about our height, strength, dexterity, and abilities. When they aim for the average person (who does not actually exist), they aren’t usable or accessible.
CREATE Post-doctoral student Momona Yamagami seeks to integrate personalization and customization into sensor design and the resulting algorithms baked into the products we use. Her research has shown that biosignal interfaces that use electromyography sensors, accelerometers, and other biosignals as inputs provide promise to improve accessibility for people with disabilities.
In a recent presentation of her research as a CREATE postdoctoral scholar, she emphasizes that generalized models that are not personalized to the individual’s abilities, body sizes, and skin tones may not perform well.
Momona Yamagami presenting her biosignal research, with a slide noting that biosignals fluctuate and are higher on the neural circuitry and a smartwatch as an “always on” sensors for continuous health monitoring.
Individualized interfaces that are personalized to the individual and their abilities could significantly enhance accessibility. Continuous (i.e., 2-dimensional trajectory-tracking) and discrete (i.e., gesture) electromyography (EMG) interfaces can be personalized to the individual:
For the continuous task, we used methods from game theory to iteratively optimize a linear model that mapped EMG input to cursor position.
For the discrete task, we developed a dataset of participants with and without disabilities performing gestures that are accessible to them.
As biosignal interfaces become more commonly available, it is important to ensure that such interfaces have high performance across a wide spectrum of users.
Momona Yamagami is completing her time as a CREATE postdoctoral scholar, advised by CREATE Co-director Jennifer Mankoff. Starting summer 2023, Yamagami will be an Assistant Professor at Rice University Electrical & Computer Engineering as part of the Digital Health Initiative.
In April 2023, CREATE hosted its first ever Accessible eSports Showcase event, bringing together members of the CREATE community, local community organizations, tech and games Corporate Partners, and folks from all over the Seattle area looking to learn about and celebrate ongoing strides being made in making video games more inclusive and accessible to people with disabilities.
Zillow Commons in the Bill & Melinda Gates Center was transformed into a gamer’s playground with big-screen projections of racing and party games, a VR space, and stations where users could customize their own adaptive gaming tech.
CREATE’s Community Partners had showcase tables, demoing the latest advances in accessible gaming technology. And UW graduate students, undergraduates, and postdocs highlighted the many creative ways they’ve worked to make games accessible:
Event co-organizers Jesse Martinez (Ph.D. student, CSE) and Momona Yamagami (Postdoc, UW CREATE) opened with an overview of the many accommodations and community access norms they established for the event.
Emma McDonnell (Ph.D. Student, HCDE) live-narrated a round of Jackbox Games’s Fibbage, followed by a competitive mixed-ability showdown in the Xbox racing game DiRT 5, in which Martinez, taking his turn as emcee/color commentator, highlighted the many techniques being used to make Xbox gameplay accessible.
Rachel Franz (Ph.D. Student, iSchool) let attendees try out her latest work in accessible VR research.
Jerry Cao (Ph.D. Student, CSE) showed attendees how to use custom 3D-printed input devices for computer accessibility.
A brilliant team of undergraduates from HuskyADAPT, including Mia Hoffman, Neha Arunkumar, Vivian Tu, Spencer Madrid, Simar Khanuja, Laura Oliveira, Selim Saridede, Noah Shalby, and Veronika Pon, demoed three fantastic projects working to bring improved switch access to video games.
Corporate and Community Partners connected with the CREATE community and engage directly with our many attendees.
Solomon Romney, of Microsoft’s Inclusive Tech Lab, showcased the brilliant design of the Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC), the state-of-the-art tool in accessible controller design, and guided attendees through setting up and playing with their own XACs.
Amber Preston of Seattle Adaptive Sports described the work SAS does to make all sorts of games and recreational activities more accessible and inclusive in the Seattle area.
Other corporate and community partners, including researchers from Meta, Google, and Apple, were on hand to meet and connect with attendees around other exciting developments in the accessible gaming space.
The organizers thank all attendees, partners, volunteers, and organizers for making the event such a success! As gaming accessibility continues to blossom, we’re looking forward to doing more events like in the future – we hope to see you at the next one!
Pre-event announcement
Who should attend?
Anyone is welcome to attend this event! In particular, we extend the invitation to anyone who has an interest in video game accessibility, who works in the games industry, or who is a member of the Seattle-area disability community.
More information about the event will be available here soon! In the meantime, if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our event co-organizer Jesse Martinez at jessejm@cs.washington.edu. We hope to see you there!
Stipend and paid parking for non-UW-affiliated attendees
For our attendees with disabilities who are not affiliated with UW, we will have a $50 stipend to cover local travel and time spent at the event. You will receive a gift card link within 10 business days after the event. We will also pay for event parking. We hope that will be helpful in covering some of the costs of attending this event.
Activities
Mainstagegameplay
Attendees can go head-to-head in our accessible esports tournament that will include Forza Horizon 5 and Rocket League.
Spotlight tables
Engage with CREATE corporate and community partners around game accessibility, including Seattle Adaptive Sports, Microsoft XBox, HuskyADAPT, and UW CREATE. Participate in accessible gaming tech demos, and more!
Non-competitive gameplay
In addition to the mainstage gameplay, there will be various accessible video games available to play, ranging from cooperative games to streamed large-audience party games. We’ll also have a VR station available! Games will include
Jackbox Party Pack Games
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
Beat Saber
Socializing, networking and food
We will also have designated spaces for attendees to socialize with each other and make new connections in the accessible gaming space. Dinner will be provided.
Accessibility & logistics
Wheelchair-accessible space & accommodations
The building entrance is level from Stevens Way and Zillow Commons is wheelchair-accessible via the elevator and wide doorways. A volunteer will be at the building entrance to help guide you to the event.
We will have the following accommodations in place:
Live gameplay commentary on Mainstage gameplay
Captions and ASL interpretation for all Mainstage content
Quiet room with ample seating and a silent livestream of Mainstage gameplay
For those interested in playing games, we will have the following devices:
Xbox Adaptive Controllers with customizable switches, joysticks, and foot pedals
Additional specialty gaming equipment provided by industry partners (TBD)
If you have any additional accommodation requests, please include them in your event registration, or reach out to Jesse Martinez at jessejm@cs.washington.edu.
Considerations to keep in mind
During the event, attendees can support each other with the following considerations:
Introduce yourself by name in a conversation.
Keep pathways clear, and be mindful of others when navigating the space.
DO NOT touch other attendees, their assistive devices, or their mobility devices without consent.
Please keep conversation family-friendly as there are children at the event.
Please wear a mask and keep your hands clean (hand sanitizer is available throughout the venue).
Questions?
Please reach out to Jesse Martinez (event co-organizer) at jessejm@cs.washington.edu with questions about this event.
Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 2:30 p.m. HUB 340 Free and open to the public
Floyd Morris, Ph.D., is the Director of the Centre for Disability Studies at the University of the West Indies, a current Member and Past President of the Senate of Jamaica – where he was also their first Blind member – and Special Rapporteur on Disability for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). He has researched inclusion of persons with disabilities in several aspects of Jamaican life and published numerous books and articles.
Senator Morris is a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which is the treaty body charged with the responsibility of overseeing the implementation and interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Sponsored by the UW Center for Global Studies, UW Disability Studies, and Law, Societies, and Justice programs to welcome visiting lecturer Floyd Morris.
CREATE welcomes our newest Advisory Board member, ChrisTiana ObeySumner.
ObeySumner (they/them) is the CEO and principal consultant of Epiphanies of Equity LLC (https://www.christianaobeysumner.com/), a social equity consulting firm specializing in change management, social and organizational psychology, intersectional equity and liberation, and disability justice.
For two decades, they’ve dedicated their life and career to exploring and practicing innovative approaches to achieving social equity – in other words, how to sustainably and effectively bring parity to areas of disparity so “humans can human with other humans” equitably, collectively, and intersectionally.
ObeySumner joins board members Mary Bellard, Amy Hurst (who also joined recently), and Jonathan Lazar. Rory A. Cooper and Juan E Gilbert are concluding their board memberships this spring; we thank them for their perspective and expertise over the past two years.
By Stephanie Kerschbaum, CREATE faculty member, Associate Professor of English, and Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric
I’ve just returned to Seattle from a trip to a conference in Chicago. On that trip, I pointed out to a friend a billboard in a downtown Chicago bus stop inviting viewers to learn to recognize the signs of a rare medical condition. And just a bit later, at my gate in O’Hare, I found myself sitting across from a large advertisement sorrowfully highlighting the signs of autism.
I can’t go very far in my everyday experience without encountering scores of material signs that point in various ways to disability. They’re not always giant billboards trumpeting the signs of a particular disability, but collectively, despite the fact that these signs are often well-intentioned, they nevertheless reinforce problematic orientations to disability that circumscribe how, where, and when disability can be noticed.
Billboards like these signs had a great deal to do in motivating my work in Signs of Disability. One of the stories I tell in the book has to do with a yellow diamond-shaped “Deaf Person in Area” road sign that appeared in my neighborhood and which I subsequently spent a lot of time talking about with people around me. At first, when I pointed the sign out to my husband, we laughed about it. “Good thing we live in the neighborhood,” I joked to him, “so that there actually is a Deaf Person in the Area.” But when I shared this story with other people, they didn’t always think it was funny.
The tension I felt between my own sense that the Deaf Person in Area sign did very little to meaningfully support attention to deafness and other people’s strong defenses of the sign (and others like it) was key to helping me build one of the core conceptual terms in Signs of Disability. That term, dis-attention, is an intentionally clunky neologism that points to the ways that disability is simultaneously hyper-perceptible and invisible in everyday life. The Deaf Person in Area needed a bold yellow sign warning others about her presence, but of course no one passing the sign has any idea who this Deaf Person in Area actually is, nor would they likely be able to identify the Deaf Person in Area.
As a middle-aged white deaf cisgender woman in a heteronormative relationship, how deafness appeared on my body and became available for others to notice was a complicated question, and deafness was never legible outside of its entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, age, environment, and more. I started by pointing to my behind-the-ear hearing aids or the ways that others might interpret the sound of my voice or encounters where I am signing with other people or encounters where I announce or name my deafness in an interaction. But the list of ways that someone might identify cues pointing to deafness kept growing, and were interactionally contingent as well as tied up in others’ perceptual practices which are themselves shaped by and through cultural milieus often saturated with ableism and dominant orientations to disability that limit how and when it can be perceived.
Learning to recognize the signs of disability involves building a conceptual and practical vocabulary, to have embodied and en-minded experiences that make such signs available for noticing, and the central project of the book is to invite readers to consider not only how dis-attention shapes perception of disability, but also the ways that disabled ways of knowing and being can help change how disability comes to be noticed and to matter in the world.
There is a wonderful, free short course, Teach Access Study Away, run by the Teach Access organization each year.
The 2023 Teach Access Virtual Study Away is a two-part series. Part 1 focuses on the basics of accessibility and disability; Part 2 covers more advanced topics so completion of Part 1 or a previous Study Access Away session is required.
The two parts combined total 7 virtual sessions, each 1 1/2 hours on Wednesdays starting on April 5th. Signup for 2023 closes on March 25th.
The CSE 121, 122, and 123 introductory course sequence lets students choose their entry point into computer science and engineering studies, whatever their background, experience, or confidence level. And, as part of the effort to improve diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), the courses were designed with “accessibility from the start.”
A member of the course development team was a dedicated accessibility expert, tasked with developing guidelines for producing accessible materials: using HTML tags correctly, providing alt text for all images, and ensuring accurate captions on all videos. The team audited both content and platforms — including the course website — for accessibility concerns.
In CSE’s DEIA Newsletter article, author Brett Wortzman, Associate Teaching Faculty, points out that “many of the guidelines followed are good universal design, helping all students, not just those with disabilities, and at the same time reducing the work for instructors needing to comply with many DRS [Disability Resources for Students] accommodations.”
Excerpted from article by Brett Wortzman, Associate Teaching Faculty, in CSE’s DEIA Newsletter.
