We're a group of researchers at Northwestern University creating accessible content production tools for people with vision impairments. 🎨🎻🎭

Ensuring the accessibility of digital information and computational tools is crucial to enabling people with vision impairments to participate in all aspects of society, from education to career prospects to personal growth. This project will introduce novel accessible tools for creating text- and audio-based content, which will support the needs of blind students and professionals whether working independently or on teams with sighted collaborators. The project has the potential to increase access to STEM-related educational experiences and career opportunities for people with vision impairments by bridging computation, engineering, and the arts. Our work will contribute:

• Design guidelines and a taxonomy for accessible content creation tools
• Novel algorithms to process text- and audio-based content, which enable new ways of presenting information while solving challenges relevant to machine learning, text analytics, and audio processing
• Accessible interaction techniques that advance the ability of blind users to understand, navigate, and edit their work
• Collaboration support features that will bridge gaps in collaboration systems and provide empirical and theoretical evidence of whether and how core collaborative processes operate in the context of mixed-ability teams
• Empirical evidence of how the developed systems support individual self-efficacy and collaboration during naturalistic use, thereby advancing inclusive online work and learning more broadly

Acknowledgement and Disclaimer:

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1901456 (award abstract). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. If you have questions or want to learn more, please contact Anne Marie Piper.