Open Source Tools for Accessibility

CREATE researchers and partners are developing new tools for finding open-source code, fabrication, and assistive technology resources.

• CREATE’s a11yhood.org site is a searchable catalog of open-source assistive technology drawn from sites such as GitHub, Ravelry, and Thingiverse. Users can tag, rate, and organize products and add their own.
• In the future, CREATE and a11yhood.org will share a research database that shares plain language descriptions of accessibility projects by CREATE researchers.
• Our friends at GOAT (Grassroots Open Assistive Tech) document, curate, preserve, make accessible, and freely share assistive technology designs and information under open licenses, as well as provide coordination and education to affiliated communities.

Archive: Coding tools

General use (cross-disability)

• Access Bibliometric Analysis: A bibliometric analysis of citation diversity in accessibility and HCI research. The GitHub repo contains scripts and data for reproducing the bibliometric analysis of citation diversity in accessibility and HCI research conducted in Wang LL et al., our CHI LBW 2021 paper.
• Systematic Review of Accessibility Papers: Accessibility literature: The data and code for our CHI2021 accessibility literature survey paper, What Do We Mean by ‘Accessibility Research’? A Systematic Review of Accessibility Papers in CHI and ASSETS from 1994 to 2019. Find the repo to our follow-up Late-Breaking Work bibliometric analysis.
• Blocks4all: Accessible, blocks-based intro to programming: A blocks-based programming environment used as an introduction to programming concepts. Blocks-based programming environments are a popular tool to teach children to program, but rely heavily on visual metaphors and are therefore not fully accessible for children with visual impairments.
  • Blocks4All Website and Blocks4All Video
  • Blocks4All CHI Paper
  • Blocks4All GitHub Repository
  • Downloadable Beta Version of Blocks4All for iPad
  • Hour of codes: First and Second
  • Dash Joins a Dance Circle! (grades K-5)
  • Dash Joins a Dance Circle! (grades 6-8)
• Disability Terminology Project: How people with disabilities identify themselves: Live results of a global survey that looks at identity-first language (IFL), where the disability is mentioned first and the person second versus person-first language (PFL), where the person first is mentioned first and the disability second. Examples of PFL include “person who is blind” “person who uses a wheelchair,” and “person who has autism.” Examples of IFL include “blind person,” “wheelchair user,” and “autistic person.”

Mobility-related innovations

• Project Sidewalk: Sidewalk accessibility data to make new technologies that support people with mobility impairments. Accessibility data is served in two formats: Access Attribute contains point-level information on what accessibility attributes exist and where (latitude-longitude); Access Score is a value that indicates how (in)accessible a given street/area is. See the Access Score APIs for examples. Get the data: REST APIs. Contribute! Get the code on github.
• UnlockedMaps: Real-time elevator stats for reliable mobility. Maps the urban rail transit stations with the primary focus on accessibility. Real-time elevator statuses are displayed, to help assist people who rely on the elevators, such as people who use wheelchairs or have strollers or bikes, plan their commute without inconvenient surprises.

Sound recognition

• ProtoSound: Sound recognition at home. A deployable interactive system for personalizing a sound recognition model in real-time using few custom recordings. Built primarily to support deaf and hard of hearing users.
• SoundWatch: Sound feedback for hard-of-hearing usersAn Android-based app designed for commercially available smartwatches to provide glanceable, always-available, and private sound feedback in multiple contexts. SoundWatch informs users about three key sound properties: sound identity, loudness, and time of occurrence through customizable sound alerts using visual and vibrational feedback. 

Accessible switch creation

Do you need accessible switches? If so, check out the SwitchKit! The customizable kit works with both commercial and homemade switches and connects to a tablet or computer to be used with apps or websites. While the team developed games for SwitchKit using Scratch, a kid-friendly programming platform, it also works with other games or apps that utilize arrow keys or the space bar for input. For DIYers and the open-source community, you may also may be interested in our tutorial on accessible switches.

For screen reader users and braille users

• VoxLens: Online data visualizations for screen reader users: JavaScript library to make online data visualizations accessible to screen reader users.
• VizWiz Grand Challenge Workshop: Benchmarking visual question answering. Working to track progress on six dataset challenges, where the tasks are to recognize objects in few-shot learning scenarios, answer visual questions, ground answers, recognize visual questions with multiple answer groundings, locate objects in few-shot learning scenarios, classify images in a zero-shot setting. The challenge drew on published work about creating a dataset for blind and low vision people that preserves their privacy during image identification processes.
• Ga11y: Automatic gif annotation system (crowdsourcing+computer vision). This is the code to accompany our paper, Ga11y: an Automated GIF Annotation System for Visually Impaired Users, published in SIGCHI
• Braille2Latex: website that lets you type in braille or upload a braille file, and download it as latex. It supports math in NEMETH format (Github: source code)