Two recent publications address unnecessary challenges faced by parents with disabilities and how those challenges are made extraordinary by a legal system that is not protecting parents or their children.
The National Council on Disability report finds that roughly 4 million parents in the U.S. who are disabled (about 6% of parents) are the only distinct community that must struggle to retain custody of their children.
While we have moved (somewhat) beyond the blatant eugenics of the 20th century, some of those tactics persist. Further, “parents with disabilities are the only distinct community of Americans who must struggle to retain custody of their children.” This is also connected to other intersectional factors. For example, “Because children from African American and Native American families are more likely to be poor, they are more likely to be exposed to mandated reporters as they turn to the public social service system for support in times of need…”
Research has shown that exposure bias is evident at each decision point in the child welfare system.
Author Robyn Poweldetails how the child welfare system employs extensive surveillance that disproportionately targets marginalized families. Yet centers for independent living and other existing programs have the potential to support these parents. Instead, “The child welfare system, more accurately referred to as the family policing system, employs extensive surveillance that disproportionately targets marginalized families, subjecting them to relentless oversight.”
One particular story in that article highlights the role of technology in this ‘policing’: “…just as the Hackneys were preparing to bring [their 8 month old] home, the Allegheny County DHS [alleged] negligence due to [the parents’] disabilities… More than a year later, their toddler remains in the foster care system, an excruciating separation for the Hackneys. The couple is left questioning whether DHS’ use of a predictive artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool unfairly targeted them based on their disabilities.”
As technologists, we wonder whether this AI tool was tested for racial or disability bias. It is essential that the technologies we create are equitable before they are deployed.
What are the opportunities for research to engage the intersection of race and disability?
What is the value of considering how constructs of race and disability work alongside each other within accessibility research studies?
Two CREATE Ph.D. students have explored these questions and found little focus on this intersection within accessibility research. In their paper, Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility (PDF), they observe that we’re missing out on the full nuance of marginalized and “otherized” groups.
The Allen School Ph.D. students, Aashaka Desai and Aaleyah Lewis, and collaborators will present their findings at the ASSETS 2023 conference on Tuesday, October 24.
Spurred by the conversation at the Race, Disability & Technology research seminar earlier in the year, members of the team realized they lacked a framework for thinking about work at this intersection. In response, they assembled a larger team to conduct an analysis of existing work and research with accessibility research.
The resulting paper presents a review of considerations for engaging with race and disability in the research and education process. It offers analyses of exemplary papers, highlights opportunities for intersectional engagement, and presents a framework to explore race and disability research. Case studies exemplify engagement at this intersection throughout the course of research, in designs of socio-technical systems, and in education.
Case studies
Representation in image descriptions: How to describe appearance, factoring preferences for self-descriptions of identity, concerns around misrepresentation by others, interest in knowing others’ appearance, and guidance for AI-generated image descriptions.
Experiences of immigrants with disabilities: Cultural barriers that include cultural disconnects and levels of stigma about disability between refugees and host countries compound language barriers.
Designing for intersectional, interdependent accessibility: How access practices as well as cultural and racial practices influence every stage of research design, method, and dissemination, in the context of work with communities of translators.
Authors, left to right: Christina Harringon, Aashaka Desai, Aaleyah Lewis, Sanika Moharana, Anne Spencer Ross, and Jennifer Mankoff
Authors
Christina N. Harrington, Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office for Civil Rights published a proposed update to the HHS regulations implementing Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits disability discrimination by recipients of federal funding.
If you have any questions, reach out to CREATE at create-contact@uw.edu.
This is the first comprehensive update to the regulations since they were first put in place more than 40 years ago. The proposed rule includes new requirements prohibiting discrimination in the areas of:
Medical treatment
The use of value assessments
Web, mobile, and kiosk accessibility
Requirements for accessible medical equipment, so that persons with disabilities have an opportunity to participate in or benefit from health care programs and activities that is equal to the opportunity afforded others.
Note that CREATE also provided a review guide and CREATE’s response in an accessible and tagged PDF document (53 pages) for a previous public comment invitation, specifically for the U.S. Department of Justice in the areas of digital accessibility.
CREATE has submitted a response, in collaboration with colleagues within the UW and at peer institutions, to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities that receive federal funds (schools, universities, agencies, etc.). The DoJ proposal invited review of the proposed guidelines.
CREATE’s official response, in collaboration with UW and other colleagues, is posted on the DOJ site temporarily.
If you have any questions, reach out to CREATE at create-contact@uw.edu.
The response commends the Department of Justice for addressing the issue of inaccessible websites and mobile apps for Title II entities through the approach proposed through the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). The future popularity of websites and apps was not anticipated when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law in 1990. Since then, websites, non-web documents, mobile apps, and other software have become popular ways for Title II entities to reach out and inform the public, to offer benefits and activities, and to use as a part of their offerings to members of the public. In recent years, many entities have asked for clearer legal guidance, so we appreciate the Department’s efforts to address these issues in proposed rulemaking.
The designers of the Virtual Traffic Stop app aim to ease tensions and prevent misunderstandings between drivers and law enforcement during traffic stops. For Hard-of-Hearing or Deaf drivers, the app can be used to communicate with law enforcement via chat during the video. Users can add family members and invite them to the chat for additional assistance.
A Gainesville Florida K-12 school has announced their endorsement of Virtual Traffic Stop and has encouraged parents and their children to sign up and start using the app. Currently, the app is being used by the University of Florida and Gainesville Florida police departments.
If your community is interested in using the app, contact Dr. Juan E. Gilbert, a former CREATE Advisory Board member and Chair of the Human-Centered Computing Department at the University of Florida, by calling 352-392-1527 or emailing juan@ufl.edu.
In September 2023, the Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities announced the designation of people with disabilities as a population with health disparities. The designation is one of several steps National Institutes of Health (NIH) is taking to address health disparities faced by people with disabilities and ensure their representation in NIH research.
Dr. Eliseo J. Pérez-Stable, in consultation with Dr. Robert Otto Valdez, the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality cited careful consideration of the National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities final report, input from the disability community, and a review of the science and evidence.
The CREATE Accessibility Seminar, CSE 590w – Accessibility Research, brings students and faculty together to explore a variety of topics relating to accessibility and technology.
Spring 2024
Spring seminars consist of short research presentations by students and affiliates, followed by discussion and critical evaluations.
Mondays, 3:30-4:30 p.m. starting April 1, 2024 Remote over Zoom
CREATE is hosting Monday Making events on Mondays at 4:30 in CSE II 283 lab. Stay with us after seminar this quarter to see what the level of interest is in thinking about, and creating, various forms of DIY Accessible Technology (DIYAT) and related technologies. The space has (and is acquiring) a variety of lightweight making equipment and accessibility equipment, such as an embroidery machine, swell paper printer, a few 3D printers. The lab is configured for soldering as well. Hope to see you there!
A proposal for new digital accessibility guidelines for entities receiving federal funds was released for review by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on August 4, 2023. Anyone affected by these guidelines has 60 days — through Tuesday, October 3, 2023 — to comment.
The DOJ is still trying to decide exactly what the rule should say, how quickly public entities should improve digital accessibility, and what exceptions to allow. For example, the current rule states that course content posted on a password-protected website (such as a learning management system (LMS) like Canvas) does not have to be made accessible until a student with a disability needs access to that content. If a student registers for the course, or transfers into it, then the course content has to be made fully accessible to all disabilities by the start of the term or within 5 days (if the term has already started). In addition, the course needs to stay accessible over time.
CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff summarizes some of the most important aspects of the proposed rule in a Guide to Reviewing and Commenting that includes many of the the questions posed by the DOJ, with additional questions to consider from Mankoff. This guide is not meant to direct your comments, rather to facilitate and encourage your review. Whatever your viewpoint on the questions raised, the DOJ should hear from you.
CREATE researchers shone this spring at the 2023 Web4All 2023 conference that, in part, seeks to “make the internet more accessible to the more than one billion people who struggle to interact with digital content each day due to neurodivergence, disability or other impairments.” Two CREATE-funded open source projects won accolades.
Built on prior research to develop taxonomies of information sought by screen-reader users to interact with online data visualizations, the team’s research used these taxonomies to extend the functionality of VoxLens—an open-source multi-modal system that improves the accessibility of data visualizations—by supporting drilled-down information extraction. They assessed the performance of their VoxLens enhancements through task-based user studies with 10 screen-reader and 10 non-screen-reader users. Their enhancements “closed the gap” between the two groups by enabling screen-reader users to extract information with approximately the same accuracy as non-screen-reader users, reducing interaction time by 22% in the process.
Authors: Ather Sharif, Aneesha Ramesh, Qianqian Yu, Trung-Anh H. Nguyen, and Xuhai Xu
Ather Sharif’s work on another project, UnlockedMaps, was honored with the Accessibility Challenge Delegates’ Award. The paper details a web-based map that allows users to see in real time how accessible rail transit stations are in six North American cities, including Seattle, Toronto, New York and the Bay Area. UnlockedMaps shows whether stations are accessible and if they are currently experiencing elevator outages. Their work includes a public website that enables users to make informed decisions regarding their commute and an open source API that can be used by developers, disability advocates, and policy makers for a variety of purposes, including shedding light on the frequency of elevator outages and their repair times to identify the disparities between neighborhoods in a given city.
Harniss’ professional background lies in special education and instructional technology, but his current focus revolves around knowledge translation, assistive technology, accessible information technology (IT), and disability law and policy.
In his role as CREATE Director for Education, Mark aims to foster collaboration and cooperation between UW “upper and lower campus,” particularly by forging connections between CREATE, the Disability Studies Program, the Institute on Human Development and Disability (IHDD), and the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. Additionally, he intends to expand CREATE’s reach by establishing links with important external communities, ensuring that the innovations generated within CREATE are available to these communities. In turn, he envisions that these communities will provide valuable insights to CREATE researchers regarding their specific needs.
The CREATE community thanks three of our founding leaders for their energy and service in launching the center as we embark upon some transitions. “CREATE would not be where it is today without the vision, passion, and commitment that Jake, Richard, and Anat brought to their work leading the center,” says CREATE Director Jennifer Mankoff.
Co-Director Jacob O. Wobbrock: From vision, to launch, to sustainable leadership
It was back in June 2019 that Jacob O. Wobbrock, CREATE’s founding Co-Director, was on a panel discussion at Microsoft’s IdeaGen 2030 event, where he talked about ability-based design. Also on that panel was future CREATE Associate Director Kat Steele. After the event, the two talked with Microsoft Research colleagues, particularly Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris, about the possibility of founding an accessible technology research center at the University of Washington.
Wobbrock and Steele thought that a center could bring faculty together and make them more than the sum of their parts. Within a few months, Wobbrock returned to Microsoft with Jennifer Mankoff, Richard Ladner, and Anat Caspi to pitch Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, on the idea of supporting the new Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). With additional support from Microsoft President Brad Smith, and input from Morris, the center was launched by Smith and UW President Ana Marie Cauce at Microsoft’s Ability Summit in Spring 2020.
Wobbrock, along with Mankoff, served as CREATE’s inaugural co-directors until June 2023, when Wobbrock stepped down into an associate director role, with Mankoff leading CREATE as sole Director. “I’m a founder by nature,” Wobbrock said. “I helped start DUB, the MHCI+D degree, a startup called AnswerDash, and then CREATE. I really enjoy establishing new organizations and seeing them take flight. Now that CREATE is soaring, it’s time for more capable hands than mine to pilot the plane. Jennifer Mankoff is one of the best, most capable, energetic, and visionary leaders I know. She will take CREATE into its next chapter and I can’t wait to see what she does.” Wobbrock will still be very active with the center.
Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner, one of CREATE’s founders and our inaugural Education Director
We thank Professor Emeritus Richard Ladner for three years of leadership as one of our founders and CREATE’s inaugural Education Director. Ladner initiated the CREATE Student Minigrant Program that helps fund small grants up to $2,000 in support of student initiated research projects.
Ladner has shepherded 10 minigrants and worked directly with eight Teach Access Study Away students. Through his AccessComputing program, he helped fund several summer research internships for undergraduate students working with CREATE faculty. All CREATE faculty contribute to accessibility related education in their courses, where he provides encouragement.
Anat Caspi defined and elevated CREATE’s translation efforts, leveraging the center’s relationships with partners in industry, disability communities, and academia. Her leadership created sustainable models for translation and built on our prior successes. Collaborations with the TASKAR center, HuskyADAPT, and the UW Disability Studies Program have ensured diverse voices to inform innovation.
Director of Translation duties will be distributed across Mankoff, CREATE’s Community Engagement and Partnerships Manager Kathleen Quin Voss, and the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, which Caspi directs.
Led by Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) Ph.D. candidate Emma McDonnell and supported by CREATE, this work investigates how groups with both hearing and d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) members could be better supported when using captions during videoconferences.
Researchers recruited four groups to participate in a series of codesign sessions, which de-centers researchers’ priorities and seeks to empower participants to lead the development of new design ideas. In the study, participants reflected on their experiences using captioning, sketched and discussed their ideas for technology that could help build accessible group norms, and then critiqued video prototypes researchers created of their ideas.
One major finding from this research is that participants’ relationships with each other shape what kinds of accessibility support the group would benefit from.
For example, one group that participated in our study were cousins who had been close since childhood. Now in their mid-twenties, they found they did not have to actively plan for accessibility; they had their ways of communicating and would stop and clarify if things broke down. On the other hand, a group of colleagues who work on technology for DHH people had many explicit norms they used to ensure communication accessibility. One participant, Blake, noted,“I was pretty emotional after the first meeting because it was just so inclusive.” These different approaches demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to communication accessibility – people work together as a group to develop an approach that works for them.
This paper also contributes new priorities for the design of videoconferencing software. Participants focused on designing add-ons to videoconferencing systems that would better support their group in communicating accessibly. Their designs fell into four categories:
Speaker Identity and Overlap: Having video conferencing tools identify speakers and warn groups when multiple people speak at once, since overlapping speech can’t be captioned accurately. Participants found this to be critical, and often missing, information.
Support for Behavioral Feedback: Building in ways for people to subtly notify conversation partners if they need to adjust their behavior. Participants desired tools to flag when people need to adjust their cameras, critical caption errors, and if speech rate gets too high. They considered, but decided against, a general purpose conversation breakdown warning.
Videoconferencing Infrastructure for Accessibility: Adding more features and configurable settings around conversational accessibility to videoconferencing platforms. Participants desired basic controls, such as color and font size, as well as the ability to preset and share group accessibility norms and customize behavior feedback tools.
Sound Information: Providing more information about the sound happening during a conversation. Participants were excited about building sound recognition into captioning tools, and considered conveying speech volume via font weight, but decided it would be overwhelming and ambiguous.
This research also has implications for broader captioning and videoconferencing design. While often captioning tools are designed for individual d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, researchers argue that we should design for the entire group having a conversation. This shift in focus revealed many ways that, on top of transcribing a conversation, technology could help groups communicate in ways that can be more effectively captioned. Many of these tools are easy to build with current technology, such as being able to click on a confusing caption to request clarification. The research team hopes that their work can illuminate the need to pay attention to groups’ social context when studying captioning and can provide videoconferencing platform designers a design approach to better support groups with mixed hearing abilities.
McDonnell is advised by CREATE Associate Directors Leah Findlater, HCDE, and Jon Froehlich, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.
The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center.
The purpose of this program is to identify and promote adoption of innovative and equitable evidence-based policy and practice solutions to help public and private sector employers of all sizes recruit, hire, retain, and advance people with disabilities, including those from historically underserved communities.
The entity awarded the EARN cooperative agreement will conduct research that values the perspectives of historically underserved groups, conduct policy analysis to identify and validate effective disability-inclusive policy and practice models, translate that knowledge into engaging tools for employers and intermediary organizations, and provide technical assistance and training to help employers of all sizes, both public and private, create inclusive workplace cultures that support high-quality employment of people with disabilities.
Current: Clinical Scientist at Gillette Children’s Hospital, leading research in the Gillette Rehabilitation Department to improve healthcare outcomes for children with complex movement conditions.
Elijah Kuska, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: In Silico Techniques to Improve Understanding of Gait in Cerebral Palsy
Dual Ph.D.s in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Math
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
Plans: Megan will join the UW AI Institute as a postdoc in Spring of 2023 to pursue clinical translation of her methods to evaluate digital biomarkers to support health and function from wearable data.
Nicole Zaino, Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering
Dissertation: Walking and rolling: Evaluating technology to support multimodal mobility for individuals with disabilities
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, 2018 – Present
Gatzert Child Welfare Fellowship, University of Washington, 2022
Best Paper Award at the European Society of Movement Analysis for Adults and Children, 2019.
Finalist, International Society of Biomechanics David Winter Young Investigator Award, 2019
Plans: Nicole is headed to Bozeman Montana to join the Crosscut Elite Training team to work toward joining the national paralympic nordic ski team for Milano-Cortina 2026, while working part-time with academia and industry partners.
Ricky Zhang
Dissertation: Pedestrian Path Network Mapping and Assessment with Scalable Machine Learning Approaches
Advisors: Anat Caspi and Linda Shapiro
Plans: Ricky will be a postdoc in Bill Howe’s lab at the University of Washington.
Kat Steele, who has been busy advising four out of five of these new PH.D.s, noted, “We have an amazing crew of graduate students continuing and expanding upon much of this work. We’re excited for new collaborations and translating these methods into the clinic and community.”
Congratulations to Emma McDonnell on receiving a Dennis Lang Award from the UW Disability Studies program! McDonnell, a fourth year Ph.D. candidate in Human Centered Design & Engineering, is advised by CREATE associate director Leah Findlater.
McDonnell’s research focuses on accessible communication technologies and explores how these tools could be designed to engage non-disabled people in making their communication approaches more accessible. She has studied how real-time captioning is used during videoconferencing and her current work is exploring how people caption their TikTok videos.
The Dennis Lang Award recognizes undergraduate or graduate students across the UW who demonstrate academic excellence in disability studies and a commitment to social justice issues as they relate to people with disabilities.
A team of Allen School robotics researchers has published a paper on the finer aspects of robot-assisted dining with friends. “A meal should be memorable, and not for a potential faux pas from the machine,” notes co-author Patrícia Alves-Oliveira. Supported by a CREATE Student minigrant and in the spirit of “nothing about us without us,” they are working with the Tyler Schrenk Foundation to address the design of robot-assisted feeding systems that facilitate meaningful social dining experiences.
The University of Washington’s Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE) seeks a Director of Strategy and Operations to join our team as a key leader to help steward this new multidisciplinary center that involves faculty from multiple units across campus.
Working in close collaboration with the Center’s Faculty Leadership Team, the Director of Strategy and Operations will have the overall responsibility of developing and overseeing organizational strategy, designing and implementing a diverse array of programs, enabling the successful execution of center operations, and helping to ensure a sustainable trajectory of high quality work in service of the Center’s core mission, which is ‘To make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology’.
CREATE, launched Spring 2020, is a collaborative effort that brings together faculty, staff, students and community partners across disciplines including computer science, engineering, rehabilitation medicine, and information sciences. Located at the University of Washington, a world-class research university, and embedded within the local community in the Pacific Northwest, this new Center is leading programs that span research, education, translation, advocacy and outreach.
This is a rare and unusual opportunity to join a community of scholars and leaders ready to help change the face of accessibility for people with disabilities. Our center addresses critical access issues throughout peoples’ lifespan and across all spheres of life. Our ideal candidate is a passionate leader and communicator with a track record of successfully growing and operating an organization. Further, the candidate possesses demonstrated experience managing and leading people, including the ability to develop and empower top-notch staff and promote a positive, inclusive and accessible culture that values societal impact and social change. This is a relatively new center, and the successful candidate is someone who excels at helping the faculty co-founders execute their vision and build a successful culture and operations.
Reporting directly to the Center Directors and working closely with other Center staff, the Director of Strategy and Operations will support CREATE’s Faculty Leadership team and Associate Directors, serving as chief administrator for all the Center’s daily operations and programs. The Director of Strategy and Operations will supervise, support and work closely with several direct reports, including a Finance Administrator, Community Manager, and Communication Manager. The Director of Strategy and Operations will also be a resource for CREATE’s diverse community of faculty affiliates, visiting professors, post docs, and students.
In CREATE, there is an expectation that all faculty and staff will step up where they see an opportunity to apply their special expertise or talents, speak up when they identify opportunities or concerns, and lead by taking actions that exemplify CREATE’s core values, including accessibility and inclusion. Individuals with disabilities and other intersectional and underrepresented backgrounds are strongly encouraged to apply. Applicants are encouraged to specify any access needs that can be of help during the application/interview process.
IMPACT TO THE UNIVERSITY
Research outputs from and activities of CREATE will help grow and advance the field of accessibility, addressing key aspects of who is included in society, and who can use the technologies that are becoming increasingly critical in today’s world. Our goal is to make sure that people with disabilities are represented as both stakeholders and leaders in all aspects of the work necessary to achieve our mission. This will continue to establish the University of Washington as the leading research institution both nationally and internationally in this field.
MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS
Bachelor’s degree with a minimum of three years of administrative and strategic management experience, including financial and budgetary oversight and at least two years of direct professional staff supervision.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to communicate effectively with a wide variety of internal and external constituents.
Ability to build a successful organizational culture and develop comprehensive internal processes.
Strategically minded, analytical leader.
Discreet facilitator and problem solver with a high tolerance for ambiguity.
Autonomous self-starter with intellectual confidence and flexibility and ability to effectively manage multiple demands and priorities.
Demonstrate a high degree of initiative-taking, problem solving capability, creativity, and capacity for innovative thinking.
Proficiency in developing budgets, fiscal monitoring and financial projections using multiple fund sources.
Strong technology skills and inclination to adapt and learn new technologies.
Demonstrated success in working with diverse populations, including people with disabilities.
Knowledge of best practices for accessibility and inclusivity in all aspects of center work from documents that are produced to meeting practices and interpersonal engagement.
DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS
Advanced degree preferred.
Experience in a large-scale, complex academic institution.
A passion for the Center’s mission: To make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.
The U.S. Department of Labor has made available $2 million for the first year of a cooperative agreement for an employer-focused, disability policy development and technical assistance center. The Employer Assistance and Resource Network on Disability Inclusion (EARN) helps employers, human resources professionals, and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility staff find the resources they need to recruit, hire, retain and advance people with disabilities.
EARN’s work has received several awards, particularly for its popular Inclusion@Work Framework, a seven-part guide for building a disability-inclusive workplace.
The U.S. Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) aims to increase the number and quality of employment opportunities for people with disabilities by developing and influencing policies and practices.
Undergrads, a 10-week summer research position is available with an interdisciplinary team led by CREATE associate directors Kat Steele, Heather Felder, and CREATE faculty member Kim Ingraham. The student researcher will study how early access to powered mobility experiences can impact toddlers with disabilities across developmental, movement, and language domains.
To apply, email your resumé/CV and a paragraph explaining your interest in the position, plus any other relevant information to Kim Ingraham.
UW CREATE collaborates toward a world with fewer problems and more solutions for people of all abilities.
The UW College of Engineering showcased CREATE’s mission, moonshots, and collaborative successes in a feature article, Rethinking disability and advancing access, written by Alice Skipton. The article is reproduced and reformatted here.
CREATE researchers and partners work on high-impact projects — such as those focused on mobility and on mobile device accessibility — advancing the inclusion and participation for people with disabilities.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), one in four people in the United States lives with a disability.
“The presence of disability is everywhere. But how disability has been constructed, as an individual problem that needs to be fixed, leads to exclusion and discrimination.”
Heather Feldner, UW Medicine assistant professor in Rehabilitation Medicine and a CREATE associate director
The construct also ignores the reality that people’s physical and mental abilities continually change. Examples include pregnancy, childbirth, illness, injuries, accidents and aging. Additionally, assuming that people all move, think or communicate in a certain way fails to recognize diverse bodies and minds. By ignoring this reality, technology and access solutions have traditionally been limited and limiting.
UW CREATE, a practical, applied research center, exists to counter this problem by making technology accessible and the world accessible through technology. Launched in early 2020 with support from Microsoft, the Center connects research to industry and the community.
On campus, it brings together accessibility experts and work-in-progress from across engineering, medicine, disability studies, computer science, information science and more, with the model always open to new collaborators.
“Anyone interested in working in the area of accessible technology is invited to become part of CREATE,” says Jacob O. Wobbrock, a professor in the UW Information School and one of the founders and co-director of the Center.
Shooting for the moon
CREATE is partnering with UW I-LABS to explore how accessibility impacts young children’s development, identity and agency. Their study uses the only powered mobility device available in the U.S. designed for children one to three years old. Photo courtesy of UW CREATE.
“We have an amazing critical mass at UW of faculty doing accessibility research,” says Jennifer Mankoff, a professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and another founder and co-director of CREATE. “There’s also a lot of cross-talk with Microsoft, other technology leaders, and local and national community groups. CREATE wants to ensure people joining the workforce know about accessibility and technology and that the work they do while they are at UW directly and positively impacts the disability community.” The Center’s community and corporate partnerships approach increases creativity and real-world impact.
The concept of moonshots — technology breakthroughs resulting from advances in space exploration — offers a captivating way of thinking about the potential of CREATE’s research. The Center currently has four research moonshots for addressing technological accessibility problems. One focuses on how accessibility impacts young children’s development, identity and agency and includes a mobility and learning study with the UW Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS) that employs the only powered mobility device available in the U.S. market specifically designed for children one to three years old. Another looks more broadly at mobility indoors and outdoors, such as sidewalk and transit accessibility. A third seeks ways to make mobile and wearable devices more accessible along with the apps people use every day to access such essentials as banking, gaming, transportation and more. A fourth works toward addressing access, equity and inclusion for multiply marginalized people.
“CREATE wants to ensure people joining the workforce know about accessibility and technology and that the work they do while they are at UW directly and positively impacts the disability community.”
— Jennifer Mankoff, founder and co-director of CREATE
For CREATE, advancing these moonshots isn’t just about areas where technologies already exist, like improving an interface to meet more people’s needs. It’s about asking questions and pushing research to address larger issues and inequities. “In certain spaces, disabled people are overrepresented, like in the unhoused or prison populations, or in health-care settings,” Mankoff says. “In others, they are underrepresented, such as in higher education, or simply overlooked. For example, disabled people are more likely to die in disaster situations because disaster response plans often don’t include them. We need to ask how technology contributes to these problems and how it can be part of the solution.”
Broader problem-solving abilities
For even greater impact, CREATE has situated these research moonshots within a practical framework for change that involves education initiatives, translation work and research funding. Seminars, conversations, courses, clubs and internship opportunities all advance the knowledge and expertise of the next generation of accessibility leaders. Translation work ensures that ideas get shaped and brought to life by community stakeholders and through collaborations with UW entities like the TASKAR Center for Accessible Technology, HuskyADAPT and the UW Disability Studies Program, as well as through collaborations with industry leaders like Microsoft, Google and Meta. CREATE’s research funding adds momentum by supporting education, translation and direct involvement of people with disabilities.
Engineering and computer science researchers seek to make digital wayfinding more equitable and accessible to more people.
Nicole Zaino, a mechanical engineering Ph.D. student participating in CREATE’s early childhood mobility technology research, describes the immense benefits of having her education situated in the context of CREATE. “It’s broadened my research and made me a better engineer,” she says. She talks about the critical importance of end-user expertise, like the families participating in the mobility and learning study. Doing collaborative research and taking classes in other disciplines gives her more insights into intersecting issues. That knowledge and new vocabulary inform her work because she can search out research from different fields she otherwise wouldn’t have known about.
More equity advocates
At the same time, Zaino’s lived experience with her disability also broadens her perspective and enhances her research. She became interested in her current field when testing out new leg braces and seeing other assistive technology on the shelves at the clinic. For Mankoff, it was the reverse. She worked in the field and then experienced disability when diagnosed with Lyme disease, something she’s incorporated into her research. Wobbrock got a front-row seat to mobility and accessibility challenges when he severely herniated his L5-S1 disc and couldn’t sit down for two years. For Feldner, although she studied disability academically as a physical therapist and in disability studies, first-hand experiences came later in her career when she became a disability advocate for one of her children and a parent. At CREATE, more than 50% of those involved have some lived experience with disability. This strengthens the Center by bringing a diversity of perspectives and first-hand knowledge about how assumptions often get in the way of progress.
Seeking to push progress further on campus, CREATE has an initiative on research at the intersection of race, disability and technology with the Allen School, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Population Health Initiative, the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Office of the ADA Coordinator.
CDC statistics show that the number of people experiencing a disability is higher when examined through the lens of race and ethnicity. With events and an open call for proposals, the initiative seeks increased research and institutional action in higher education, health care, artificial intelligence, biased institutions and more.
“If we anticipate that people don’t conform to certain ability assumptions, we can think ahead,” says Wobbrock. “What would that mean for a particular technology design? It’s a longstanding tenant of accessibility research that better access for some people results in better access for all people.”
Make a gift
By supporting UW CREATE, you can help make technology accessible and make the world accessible through technology.
