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Jacob O. Wobbrock, Associate Director

I seek to scientifically understand people’s performance and experiences with interactive technologies, and to design, build, and evaluate better interaction techniques and systems, especially for people with disabilities. I have done extensive work in text entry, pointing, touch, and gesture; human performance measurement and modeling; HCI research and design methods; virtual reality; mobile HCI; and accessible computing. I consider myself a blend of computer scientist, interaction designer, and experimental psychologist.

Affiliations

Professor, The Information School

Adjunct Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering

Director, ACE Lab

Jacob O. Wobbrock, a 40-something white man with short hair, a beard, and glasses. He is smiling in front of a white board.
Jacob O. Wobbrock, CREATE Co-Director, Emeritus

  Wobbrock web page

  wobbrock@uw.edu

  Google Scholar

Research highlights

Research highlights

The Slide Rule project invented the world’s first touch-based finger-driven screen reader for smartphones. The interaction techniques employed by Slide Rule influenced Apple in their creation of VoiceOver, their built-in smartphone screen reader, and subsequently TalkBack on Android. Developed from 2007 to 2008, today Slide Rule has directly influenced products shipping on billions of touch devices. This work was honored for its lasting impact at ACM ASSETS 2019.

A new design approach developed from 2011 to the present emphasizes what people can do and seeks to tailor technologies to people’s specific abilities through adaptation, customization, and ability-focused design practice. Interfaces that adapt their designs to their users’ abilities, touch recognizers that model their users’ touch behaviors, and mouse cursors that dynamically adapt their speeds to make pointing more accurate were all projects that came from, and informed, ability-based design, whose 2018 Communications of the ACM article has been influential at major companies, including Microsoft and Google.

Mouse pointing and text entry are still the most fundamental inputs we give desktop and laptop computing systems, but for many users, these bedrock input capabilities are still inaccessible. Since my doctoral research from 2001 to 2006, I have been inventing and evaluating more accessible means of providing input to computing systems. For example, my EdgeWrite text entry system provided more accessible text input using handheld devices, wheelchair joysticks, touchpads, and trackballs. My Pointing Magnifier software, a research project with Dr. Leah Findlater, provides a cursor replacement on Microsoft Windows that has been useful to people with motor or visual impairments, older adults, and graphic artists and designers.

Recent awards and honors

  • 2025 ACM SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award
  • 2024 ACM UIST Lasting Impact Award

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