Projects
Advancing Design Methods with People with Dementia
Researchers can greatly benefit from conducting user-centered design with people with dementia, but may face issues such as recruitment and ensuring research activities are accessible and non-exploitative. Through a range of projects, including intergenerational hackathons, remote research methods, and participatory action research, we are developing new ways to design with people with dementia. (PI: Amanda Lazar)
Understanding Accessibility Needs in Dementia
While established accessibility principles help technologists create interfaces that can be used by people with many different kinds of disabilities, our understanding of accessible technology design for people with dementia is still in its infancy. We are conducting interviews, observations, and co-design workshops with people at different stages of dementia as well as practitioners who work closely with people with dementia to contribute to knowledge in this area. (PI: Amanda Lazar) Watch a presentation about one study, which identifies ways that sensory changes affect technology use.
Towards Unified Guidelines for Kiosk Accessibility
Kiosks come in many different forms, including: public kiosks with unlimited use and no personal information; kiosks which require personal information but allow for unlimited use (e.g. ATMs); and kiosks which require personal information and allow limited use (voting machines). The Trace Center is currently working on creating a set of unified guidelines for kiosk accessibility, bringing together requirements and guidelines from different countries and usage domains. These unified guidelines will have a combination of hardware strategies that must be applied to make kiosks accessible, while also having flexibility depending on the type of kiosk and the context of use. (PIs: Gregg Vanderheiden, J. Bern Jordan) Read more about the Kiosk Accessibility Guidelines in an Interactions article. And watch a webinar on kiosk accessibility.
Morphic: Making computers and accessibility easier
Morphic is a new open-source tool developed at the Trace Center, for making computers easier to use for those who use assistive technologies. It makes it easier for people to discover and quickly access and use the features that are built into computers. And it lets a person’s assistive technologies and settings follow them and appear on any computer they need to use. Companies can also use Morphic to instantly set up new corporate computers so that interns, new employees and others can have their computers set up and ready to go literally in minutes, rather than the days or weeks it often takes. (PI: Gregg Vanderheiden) For more information, go to the Morphic project web site for more information.
Extending data science and data-driven technologies to be inclusive
We will gather, document, and promote the appropriate use of disability data in both disability-related and non-disability-related data-driven innovation and technologies to ensure that they are usable by and applicable to people with disabilities. Goals of this project include: to increase the availability to the community of data that is collected from populations for the purpose of accessibility research and engineering, to highlight the potential limitations of these data and how they differ from mass data, to promote the effective and ethical use of accessibility data, to accelerate data-driven technological innovations for universally accessible information, and to raise awareness about machine learning bias for people with disabilities. (PI: Hernisa Kacorri)
Exploring “teachable interfaces” as improved approach for intelligent self-adapting interfaces that also puts interfaces back under user control
We will test (through an in-depth example) the potential of “teachable interfaces” for more effective and accessible human-in-the loop personalization of innovative technologies that use machine learning. We will demonstrate how the concept of teachable interfaces can be effectively incorporated into a real-world assistive technology, explore challenges that users with disabilities may have in conceptualizing teachability, analyze user strategies for incorporating variation in their training examples and how they relate to system performance, and understand what design parameters, sensing modalities, and interactions are most influential for both system accuracy and user experience. (PI: Hernisa Kacorri)
DeveloperSpace
The DeveloperSpace is designed to be a one-stop place to find resources, components and people to conceive, develop, test and market novel accessible solutions. It includes a comprehensive MasterList of all of the known accessibility strategies for Information and communication technologies (ICT), QuickSheets on different accessibility topics, a compendium of all of the different open-source accessibility projects and components, and marketing advice. Anyone can contribute to the site and all are invited to access it. (PI: Gregg Vanderheiden)
