About Community Partnerships

The Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology Experiences is focused on improving accessibility and equity for people with disabilities within the rapidly changing world of technology. With directors representing the fields of disability studies, computing, engineering, rehabilitation medicine, and information science, CREATE is working to transform the way the world approaches accessibility.

---

Our mission: to make technology accessible and make the world accessible through technology.

---

Help us CREATE change

To achieve our mission, CREATE relies on the expertise of those active in the disability community to help guide our efforts. CREATE is looking to connect with organizations interested in sharing their knowledge, expertise, and lived experiences.

Partner with Us!

Actively engage with current CREATE teams and projects by becoming a Community Partner. CREATE’s partnerships with the community touch all stages of our work – from listening to the needs of those with lived experience to identify future projects, collaborating with impacted communities during the research process, and gathering feedback from users when that research is translated into real-world applications.

Benefits of Partnership

Being a community partner comes with many benefits including:

• Recognition on our website including your logo and a link to your organization’s site
• Early access to special CREATE events
• Opportunities to connect with industry, community, and campus organizations and individuals that share a passion for accessibility
• Have your job postings, events, and other accessibility calls to action included in our outreach materials

CREATE-ive solutions

Highlights from our research, education and translation initiatives

Through cooperation, trust, and transparency with our partners, CREATE is forging a path between innovative research and sustainable real-world impact:

• In partnership with communities around the globe, Anat Caspi and Jon Froehlich are improving urban accessibility by addressing issues in the built environment such as making sidewalks usable for all.
• Pointing Magnifier 2, a product-grade utility created by Jacob Wobbrock and Leah Findlater, replaces the traditional computer pointer with a larger “area cursor” to make it easier for those with motor impairments to successfully click on tiny targets.
• Work on mobile accessibility testing by James Fogarty and students directly contributed to Apple’s Screen Recognition in iOS 14 and Google’s recent updates to the widely used Accessibility Scanner.
• Led by Jennifer Mankoff, CREATE is responding to a call from the US Science and Technology Policy
  Office, to advance the discussion of potential disability bias and risk in the use of biometric technology.
• Heather Feldner and Kat Steele, in collaboration with the UW Institute of Learning and Brain Sciences are furthering access and understanding in the area of mobility and early childhood development.
• Under the leadership of Richard Ladner, CREATE assisted in the creation of Blocks4All, the first block-based programming environment for touchscreen devices that makes the world of coding accessible to those with visual impairments.