- CREATE Co-Director Emeritus
My research seeks to scientifically understand people’s experiences of computers and information, and to improve those experiences through design and engineering, especially for people with disabilities. My specific research topics include input & interaction techniques, human performance measurement & modeling, HCI research & design methods, mobile computing, and accessible computing.
Affiliations
Professor, The Information School
Adjunct Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering
Director, ACE Lab
Research highlights
Slide Rule
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 TalkBackon Android. Developed from 2007 to 2008, today Slide Rule has directly influenced products shipping on billions of touch devices. This work was recently honored for its impact.
Ability-Based Design
A new design approach developed from 2008 to 2020 that 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 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.
Accessible Input Techniques
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 own 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 technology provided more accessible text input using handheld devices, wheelchair joysticks, touchpads, and trackballs. Recently, my Pointing Magnifier 2 software, originally a research project with Leah Findlater, provides a cursor replacement on Microsoft Windows that has been useful to people with motor or visual impairments, older adults, and graphic designers.
Related news
Contact
206-616-2541
- UW News: A11yBoard accessible presentation software
- CREATE Open Source Projects Awarded at Web4All
- Deep Gratitude to Wobbrock, Ladner & Caspi
- Jacob O. Wobbrock awarded Ten-Year Technical Impact Award
- Wobbrock Co-leads ACM UIST Conference, Brings Accessibility to the Conversation
- Large-Scale Analysis Finds Many Mobile Apps Are Inaccessible
- Ga11y improves accessibility of automated GIFs for visually impaired users
- Wobbrock team's VoxLens allows screen-reader users to interact with data visualizations
- CREATE Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock Named ACM Fellow
- UW CREATE leadership at ASSETS 2020