CREATE faculty, students and partners collaborate on exciting breakthroughs in accessible technology—advancing the inclusion and participation for people with disabilities.
We focus on enabling people with disabilities to be part of the creation process, giving people with disabilities the education, voice, inspiration and opportunity to enter and move through their education and into professional settings.
- 41 papers on accessible technology published by CREATE founders and students, 18 (44%) of which directly used CREATE support.
- 4 career-level awards went to CREATE founders: AAAS Fellow (Ladner), ACM Fellow (Wobbrock), ASSETS 10-year lasting impact award (Mankoff), and ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award (Mankoff).
CREATE faculty bring multiple perspectives including technology design and engineering, and also disability rights and advocacy. Some of CREATE’s high-impact research emphasizes:
Early Access and the Brain
How do early experiences with mobility technology impact brain development and learning outcomes? CREATE is partnering with UW I-LABS to answer this and other questions. This joint work will demonstrate that early access to mobility technology is a critical asset for development and learning and also contributes to CREATE’s goal of understanding and addressing historical perceptions of disability and assistive technology, which often serve to perpetuate exclusion despite legislation protecting individuals’ rights to mobility and technology.
Ongoing collaborations with Go Baby Go and HuskyAdapt are providing early childhood access to accessibility tools.
More about Early Access and the Brain Research at CREATE
Mobility, Indoors and Outdoors
Mobility is a precursor to community living and engagement and is a critical equity issue. Project Sidewalk, which uses deep learning and crowdsourcing to identify inaccessible sidewalks, and Open Sidewalks, which collects the data to provide routing directions to pedestrians personalized to their unique disability needs, are deployed in cities around the world, and have directly impacted not only pedestrians but also city governments and policies.
20 cities engaged in improving pedestrian access
1 million labels for sidewalks provided by users
More than 10 mapathons in the past year
Mobile Device Accessibility
Mobile apps have become a key feature of everyday life, with apps for banking, work, entertainment, communication, transportation, and education, to name a few. But many apps remain inaccessible to people with disabilities who use screen readers or other assistive technologies. CREATE is working to support automated diagnosis and repair of mobile app accessibility failures for all mobile apps. CREATE faculty are also exploring other aspects of mobile app accessibility, such as creating better touch screens based on how people with disabilities actually interact.
Collected at scale accessibility data from 312 apps over 16 months
Conducted qualitative accessibility evaluation of 30 popular Android educational games
100,000 downloads of the Pointing Magnifier, a desktop pointing aid that makes the mouse easier to use for people with limited fine motor function
Access, Equity and Inclusion
CREATE’s work includes efforts to improve data equity. Examples include our commentary on disability bias in biometrics; work on data visualization access during COVID; and development of a blocks-based language accessible to students with disabilities. A recent CREATE seminar focused on the intersection of race and disability, which has led to a new initiative, Race, Disability & Technology.
RESEARCH NEWS
Zhang is CREATE’s Newest Apple AIML fellow
March 18, 2024 Congratulations to Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang – the most recent CREATE Ph.D. student to receive an Apple Scholars in AIML PhD fellowship. The prestigious award supports students through funding, internship opportunities, and mentorship with an Apple researcher. Zhang is a 3rd-year iSchool Ph.D. student advised by Prof. Jacob. O Wobbrock. His research focuses…
Wheels in motion: Improving mobility technologies for children
February 28, 2024 Being able to easily get from the house to the playground affects how long and how often children use an adapted ride-on car, according to a study, Off to the park: a geospatial investigation of adapted ride-on car usage, published by CREATE Ph.D. student Mia Hoffman with CREATE associate directors Heather A.…
ARTennis attempts to help low vision players
December 16, 2023 People with low vision (LV) have had fewer options for physical activity, particularly in competitive sports such as tennis and soccer that involve fast, continuously moving elements such as balls and players. A group of researchers from CREATE associate director Jon E. Froehlich's Makeability Lab hopes to overcome this challenge by enabling…
UW News: How an assistive-feeding robot went from picking up fruit salads to whole meals
November, 2023 Training a robot to feed people presents an array of challenges for researchers. Foods come in a nearly endless variety of shapes and states (liquid, solid, gelatinous), and each person has a unique set of needs and preferences. A team led by CREATE Ph.D. students Ethan K. Gordon and Amal Nanavati created a…
Off to the Park: A Geospatial Investigation of Adapted Ride-on Car Usage
November 7, 2023 Adapted ride-on cars (ROC) are an affordable, power mobility training tool for young children with disabilities. But weather and adequate drive space create barriers to families' adoption of their ROC. CREATE Ph.D. student Mia E. Hoffman is the lead author on a paper that investigates the relationship between the built environment and…