Portrait of Dr. Chieko Asakawa, recipient of the 2024 SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions

Dr. Chieko Asakawa is an IBM Fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the Chief Executive Director of The National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Miraikan) in Japan, and an IBM Distinguished Service Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Her remarkable career has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards and honors. Among these, becoming an IBM Fellow in 2009, receiving the “Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon” from the Emperor of Japan in 2013, her induction into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2019, and being named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors are particularly noteworthy.

Dr. Asakawa has made significant contributions to improving accessibility for people with visual impairments in both the digital and physical worlds. Her pioneering work began with the development of the Braille Editing System (BES), a groundbreaking digital system that converts Japanese text into braille. This innovation provided greater flexibility for braille writers and transcribers, overcoming the challenges posed by the Japanese alphabet’s complexity. Additionally, she developed the Braille Forum Network, a database of braille books that dramatically increased the availability of braille literature in Japan. Today, this system, now called SAPIE, remains in use nationwide with over 800,000 titles.

With the rise of digital information, Dr. Asakawa played a crucial role in making the web more accessible to visually impaired people. One of her most impactful contributions was the development of a browser app that converted text to speech, leading to IBM’s Home Page Reader, the world’s first practical voice web browser. This groundbreaking technology set the standard for web accessibility, influencing the development of the WCAG and Section 508 Web Accessibility Standards in 2000. Her innovative contributions, such as link sonification and structured content access, have since become standard features in screen readers.

Dr. Asakawa has developed impactful tools like the Accessibility Internet Browser for Multimedia (aiBrowser) and aDesigner, which help ensure that people with visual impairments can access and control multimedia content and assess a webpage’s accessibility. Her projects, including Social Accessibility, leveraged crowdsourcing to make the Internet a more inclusive space, directly impacting society and future research.

Her contributions also include enhancing accessibility in the physical world. Dr. Asakawa led the NavCog project, an indoor navigation system that provides turn-by-turn instructions to blind users. This state-of-the-art system has been implemented in various challenging environments, including airports, hospitals, and museums. Her commitment to open-source development has allowed others to build on and extend her work. In addition, she further impacted this area with innovations like the AI Suitcase project, an autonomous navigation robot for blind people.

As the Chief Executive Director of the Miraikan Museum, Dr. Asakawa is also making significant strides in improving accessibility in cultural and science education. Under her leadership, the museum is working to become a leader in accessibility, ensuring that all visitors, regardless of their abilities, can engage with and enjoy the exhibits.

Dr. Chieko Asakawa’s exceptional contributions to computing and accessibility have spanned decades and have had a profound impact on the lives of people with visual impairments. Her dedication to improving accessibility, coupled with her significant academic and societal contributions, make her a truly deserving recipient of the SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility. Dr. Asakawa’s work continues to inspire and shape a more inclusive world for all.