R.E. Ladner

• University of Washington

Sign languages are used as a primary language by approximately 70 million D/deaf people world-wide. However, most communication technologies operate in spoken and written languages, creating inequities in access. To help tackle this problem, we release ASL Citizen, the largest Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR) dataset to date, collected wit...

Deaf and hard of hearing students studying advanced topics in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) lack standard terminology to enable them to learn, discuss and contribute to their chosen fields. The ASL-STEM Forum enables the diverse, thinly-spread groups that are independently creating and us1ing terminology to come together...

Sign language datasets are essential to developing many sign language technologies. In particular, datasets are required for training artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems. Though the idea of using AI/ML for sign languages is not new, technology has now advanced to a point where developing such sign language technologies is...

As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people’s abilities t...

Students with disabilities face a variety of challenges including those related to stigma around disability, inaccessible tools and instruction, disability disclosure, and a lack of mentors. This Birds of a Feather (BOF) session at the 2021 SIGCSE Technical Symposium brought together individuals who are interested in increasing the representation o...

Keypad-based character input in existing digital calculator applications on touch screen devices requires precise, targeted key presses that are time-consuming and error-prone for many screen reader users. We demonstrate GestureCalc, a digital calculator that uses target-free gestures for arithmetic tasks. It allows eyes-free target-less input of d...

A digital calculator is one of the most frequently used touch screen applications. However, keypad-based character input in existing calculator applications requires precise, targeted key presses that are time-consuming and error-prone for many screen readers users. We introduce GestureCalc, a digital calculator that uses target-free gestures for a...

The (CSP) College content Board’s has become AP Computer a major Science new course Principles for introducing K-12 students to the discipline. The course was designed for many reasons, but one major goal was to broaden participation. While significant work has been completed toward equity by many research groups, we know of no systematic analysis...

The use of technology in educational settings is extremely common. For many visually impaired children, educational settings are the first place they are exposed to the assistive technology that they will need to access mainstream computing devices. Current laws provide support for students to receive training from Teachers of the Visually Impaired...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability. Students with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. At the K-12 level, many tools used to teach computing have limited accessibility to students with disabilities. This BOF will bring together individuals who are interest...

Block-based programming environments such as Scratch are designed to make programming easier to learn for both children and adults. Unfortunately, these environments rely so heavily on visual features that they are inaccessible to people who are blind and use screen readers. To address this problem, we created Blocks4All, a block-based environment...

As diversity efforts in computer science begin to recognize disabled programmers as an underrepresented group, we step back to chronicle the experiences of blind programmers in higher education. Through a survey and follow-up interviews with 10 blind programmers, we share reflections and barriers important for the computing education community to u...

The College Board's AP Computer Science Principles (CSP) content has become a major new course for introducing K-12 students to the discipline. The course was designed for many reasons, but one major goal was to broaden participation. While significant work has been completed toward equity by many research groups, we know of no systematic analysis...

Sign languages lack a standard written form, preventing millions of Deaf people from accessing text in their primary language. A major barrier to adoption is difficulty learning a system which represents complex 3D movements with stationary symbols. In this work, we leverage the animation capabilities of modern screens to create the first animated...

Blocks-based programming environments are a popular tool to teach children to program, but they rely heavily on visual metaphors and are therefore not fully accessible for children with visual impairments. We evaluated existing blocks-based environments and identified five major accessibility barriers for visually impaired users. We explored techni...

As conversational agents and digital assistants become increasingly pervasive, understanding their synthetic speech becomes increasingly important. Simultaneously, speech synthesis is becoming more sophisticated and manipulable, providing the opportunity to optimize speech rate to save users time. However, little is known about people's abilities t...

Industry demand for software developers with knowledge of accessibility has increased substantially in recent years. However, there is little knowledge about the prevalence of higher education teaching about accessibility or faculty's perceived barriers to teaching accessibility. To address this gap, we surveyed 14,176 computing and information sci...

A panel of students with disabilities who are pursuing computing degrees will describe their experiences both in and out of the classroom. The goal of the panel is to provide the audience with an opportunity to hear first-hand how their educational needs were met as non-traditional computing students. In addition to the panelists' short presentatio...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability. Students with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. At the K-12 level, many tools used to teach computing have limited accessibility to students with disabilities. This BOF will bring together individuals who are interest...

For over a decade, AccessComputing has worked to increase the participation of people with disabilities in computing fields. A key component of this work is to influence institutional change in educational institutions, computing organizations, government labs, and industry companies. This paper considers lessons learned in working with these partn...

Blocks-based programming environments, such as Scratch and Blockly, are designed to make learning programming easier for young children. They are increasingly being used for both formal and informal curriculum, such as many of Code.org's hour of code projects. However, these block-based environments rely heavily on visual metaphors and interactions...

For the past ten years there has been a concerted effort to bring computer science to K-12 students in the United States (US) and in other countries. There is a growing realization that computer science is a fundamental subject like mathematics and sciences. In order to make this effort include the approximately 7.4 million K-12 students with disab...

People who are blind or low vision may have a harder time participating in exercise due to inaccessibility or lack of encouragement. To address this, we developed Eyes-Free Yoga using the Microsoft Kinect that acts as a yoga instructor and has personalized auditory feedback based on skeletal tracking. We conducted two different studies on two diffe...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability of some kind. Students with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. At the K-12 level, many tools used to teach computing are inaccessible to students with disabilities. This BOF will bring together individuals who are inter...

Quorum is a relatively new programming language that was originally designed for students with disabilities. In recent years, as its adoption has increased worldwide in K-12 (largely in middle/high school) and at universities, it has expanded to be a powerful, commercial-grade, programming language that includes support for 3D gaming, music, and ot...

Sounds provide informative signals about the world around us. In situations where non-auditory cues are inaccessible, it can be useful for deaf and hard-of-hearing people to be notified about sounds. Through a survey, we explored which sounds are of interest to deaf and hard-of-hearing people, and which means of notification are appropriate. Motiva...

We take a qualitative approach to understanding deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students' experiences with real-time captioning as an access technology in mainstream university classrooms. We consider both existing human-based captioning as well as new machine-based solutions that use automatic speech recognition (ASR). We employed a variety of qual...

Since 1976, when California State University Northridge (CSUN) began its Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference, there have been specialized conferences with an accessibility theme. The first ACM ASSETS Conference was held in 1994 when 22 papers were presented. The Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technolog...

How can the broader field of computer science research be harnessed to address challenges and opportunities in accessibility? This poster summarizes the findings of a workshop, sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (USA), that brought together computer scientists, representatives of disability advocacy organizations, people from industry,...

Seeking to expand inclusiveness in computer science education.

AccessComputing works to increase the participation of individuals with disabilities in computing fields. During over ten years of work to address this issue, project staff have facilitated a nationwide community of students with disabilities who are interested in computing. Students engage with peers, staff, and mentors and participate in career d...

In this document, we as representatives of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community lay out a request and plan for a SIG Meeting at CHI, in conjunction with AccessComputing, addressing the accessibility of participation in the CHI conference. We describe our organizations, our expected attendees, our approach and schedule of topics for the conducting the...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability of some kind. Students with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. This BOF will bring together individuals who are interested in increasing the representation of students with disabilities in computing and improving their...

Textbook figures are often converted into a tactile format for access by blind students. These figures are not truly accessible unless the text within the figures is also made accessible. A common solution to access text in a tactile image is to use embossed Braille. We have developed an alternative to Braille that uses QR codes for students who wa...

Lessons learned from a decade of practice.

Mobile sign language video conversations can become unintelligible if high video transmission rates cause network congestion and delayed video. In an effort to understand the perceived lower limits of intelligible sign language video intended for mobile communication, we evaluated sign language video transmitted at four low frame rates (1, 5, 10, a...

People who are blind or low-vision may have a harder time participating in exercise due to inaccessibility or lack of experience. We employed Value Sensitive Design (VSD) to explore the potential of technology to enhance exercise for people who are blind or low-vision. We conducted 20 semi-structured interviews about exercise and technology with 10...

It can be difficult for a blind developer to understand and navigate through a large amount of code quickly, as they are unable to skim as easily as their sighted counterparts. To help blind developers overcome this problem, we present StructJumper, an Eclipse plugin that creates a hierarchical tree based on the nesting structure of a Java class. T...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability of some kind. Those with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. This BOF will bring together those who are interested in improving the success of these students. Strategies will be shared among the participants of the BOF t...

Students learning American Sign Language (ASL) have trouble searching for the meaning of unfamiliar signs. ASL signs can be differentiated by a small set of simple features including hand shape, orientation, location, and movement. In a feature-based ASL-to-English dictionary, users search for a sign by providing a query, which is a set of observed...

This special session is for SIGCSE attendees who are interested in K-12 computing education, especially those who have or are planning to have a NSF CS 10K project. A major goal of CS 10K is broadening participation, which includes providing computing education to students with disabilities. This interactive session will introduce attendees to Acce...

There are many educational smartphone games for children, but few are accessible to blind children. We present BraillePlay, a suite of accessible games for smartphones that teach Braille character encodings to promote Braille literacy. The BraillePlay games are based on VBraille, a method for displaying Braille characters on a smartphone. BraillePl...

Textbook figures are often converted into a tactile format for access by blind students. These figures are not truly accessible unless the text within the figures is also made accessible. A common solution to access text in a tactile image is to use embossed Braille. We have developed an alternative to Braille that uses QR codes for students who wa...

Mobile sign language video communication has the potential to be more accessible and affordable if the current recommended video transmission standard of 25 frames per second at 100 kilobits per second (kbps) as prescribed in the International Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) Q. 26/16 were relaxed. To investigate sign language video...

Textbook images are converted into tactile graphics to be made accessible to blind and low vision students. The text labels on these graphics are an important part of the image and must be made accessible as well. The graphics usually have the labels embossed in Braille. However, there are some blind and low vision students who cannot read Braille...

People who are blind or visually impaired face difficulties accessing a growing array of everyday appliances, needed to perform a variety of daily activities, because they are equipped with electronic displays. We are developing a "Display Reader" smartphone app, which uses computer vision to help a user acquire a usable image of a display, to addr...

Because I started out in mathematics and theoretical computer science I am often asked how I got involved in accessibility research and in trying to increase the participation of people with disabilities in computing fields. In this article I will try to explain the why and how of becoming an accessibility researcher and why it is so important to i...

Approaches to to the design of technology for people with disabilities are surveyed. These include universal design, user centered design, participatory design, ability based design, and finally, design for user empowerment. A key feature of the latter is access to advanced education for disabled scientists and engineers to create the next generati...

A panel of college students with disabilities who are computing majors or have taken multiple computing courses will describe their experiences both in and out of the classroom. The goal of the panel is to provide the audience with an opportunity to hear first-hand how their educational needs were met as non-traditional computing students. In addit...

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is an international treaty that outlines the rights of persons with disabilities and how nations who sign and ratify the convention should ensure those rights. The CRPD has 50 articles with the purpose stated in part in Articles. Article 4.g. recognizes that research an...

This case study describes evidence-based practices employed by a collection of University of Washington projects that engage high school and postsecondary students with disabilities in work-based learning experiences such as industry and research internships, career development activities, job shadows, field trips, and mock interviews. The purpose...

We present VBGhost: an accessible, educational smartphone game for people who are blind or low vision. It is based on the word game Ghost, in which players take turns adding letters to a word fragment while attempting to not complete a word. VBGhost uses audio and haptic feedback to reinforce Braille concepts. Players enter letters in the game by u...

Eyes-free input usually relies on audio feedback that can be difficult to hear in noisy environments. We present DigiTaps, an eyes-free number entry method for touchscreen devices that requires little auditory attention. To enter a digit, users tap or swipe anywhere on the screen with one, two, or three fingers. The 10 digits are encoded by combina...

Voice conversion is a technique that transforms the source speaker’s individuality to that of the target speaker. In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive voice conversion algorithm that does not use training data between different languages, but uses text-to-speech generated speech rather than real recorded voices. The suggested method fin...

Approximately 10% of computer science and engineering majors have a disability of some kind. Students with disabilities are more likely to drop out of the major than those without disabilities. This BOF will bring together individuals who are interested in increasing the representation of students with disabilities in computing and improving their...

It is predicted that the demand for workers in computing fields will continue to be high for years to come. However, some groups of people continue to be underrepresented in academic programs and careers in computing. People with disabilities form one such group of untapped talent. This article addresses the unique challenges faced by individuals w...

Enabling end-users of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems to add personalized video content at runtime holds promise for improving communication, but the requirements for such systems are as yet unclear. To explore this issue, we present Vid2Speech, a prototype AAC system for children with complex communication needs (CCN) that...

Blind mobile device users face security risks such as inaccessible authentication methods, and aural and visual eavesdropping. We interviewed 13 blind smartphone users and found that most participants were unaware of or not concerned about potential security threats. Not a single participant used optional authentication methods such as a password-p...

A new non-visual method of numeric entry into a smartphone is designed, implemented, and tested. Users tap the smartphone screen with one to three fingers or swipe the screen in order to enter numbers. No buttons are used--only simple, easy-to-remember gestures. A preliminary valuation with sighted users compares the method to a standard accessible...

Participants will leave the session with an understanding of what universal design of instruction is and how it can make college classes and labs more welcoming and accessible for students and individuals from a broad range of backgrounds. Participants will also leave with a number of suggestions for ways to apply universal design to their classroo...

Seeking to improve the process for writing and reviewing proposals for new educational programs.

The H.264/AVC standard significantly improves video compression performance over earlier standards at the cost of increased complexity. In this paper, we present two offline algorithms for generating a lookup table of parameter settings that can be used by a complexity control algorithm for controlling the speed of the H.264 encoder. Our algorithms...

We present Input Finger Detection (IFD), a novel technique for nonvisual touch screen input, and its application, the Perkinput text entry method. With IFD, signals are input into a device with multi-point touches, where each finger represents one bit, either touching the screen or not. Maximum likelihood and tracking algorithms are used to detect...

Deaf and hard of hearing students in STEM fields often encounter barriers including lack of adequate captioning and sign language interpretation. They also encounter visual barriers in the learning environment, such as when instructors use visual aids that are optimized for listening and not viewing, thus forcing students to juggle simultaneous vis...

Traditional user technology for communication, such as phones, computers, television, and radio, may not directly work for people who have sensory disabilities. Five classes of communication access technology are discussed: hearing enhancement technology, deaf technology, vision enhancement technology, blind technology, and deaf-blind technology. T...

Many wonderful enrichment programs have been created to introduce young people to computing, but with little attention to making them accessible to students with disabilities. In this workshop participants will learn from practitioners who have introduced computing and programming to young people with disabilities. They will also learn first-hand f...

Seeking a comprehensive view of minority student demographics to determine what programs and policies are needed to promote diversity.

People with disabilities have always overcome accessibility problems by enlisting people in their community to help. The Internet has broadened the available community and made it easier to get on-demand assistance remotely. In particular, the past few years have seen the development of technology in both research and industry that uses human power...

We explore using vibration on a smartphone to provide turn-by-turn walking instructions to people with visual impairments. We present two novel feedback methods called Wand and ScreenEdge and compare them to a third method called Pattern. We built a prototype and conducted a user study where 8 participants walked along a pre-programmed route using...

Video and image quality are often objectively measured using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), but for sign language video, human comprehension is most important. Yet the relationship of human comprehension to PSNR has not been studied. In this survey, we determine how well PSNR matches human comprehension of sign language video. We use very low b...

Many touch screens remain inaccessible to blind users, and those approaches to providing access that do exist offer minimal support for interacting with large touch screens or spatial data. In this paper, we introduce a set of three software-based access overlays intended to improve the accessibility of large touch screen interfaces, specifically i...

The ASL-STEM Forum is a web forum which allows people who know American Sign Language (ASL), to contribute signs in the fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). A key problem is increasing participation and contributions to the forum. To solve this problem, we introduced personal smart notifications, based on user profile...

This special issue includes the second set of articles addressing broadening participation in computing education. The articles span the stages of the pipeline, from introducing middle school children to computer science to retaining under-represented groups at the university level. The preface presented here outlines the need for increasing the pa...

In this forum we will celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor

This special issue includes the first set of articles addressing broadening participation in computing education. The articles span the stages of the pipeline, from introducing middle school children to computer science to retaining underrepresented groups at the university level. The preface presented here outlines the need for increasing the part...

Blind and deaf-blind people often rely on public transit for everyday mobility, but using transit can be challenging for them. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 13 blind and deaf-blind people to understand how they use public transit and what human values were important to them in this domain. Two key values were identified: independence...