News from the ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing
News
SIGACCESS Best Paper Award 2024
Engaging with Children’s Artwork in Mixed Visual-Ability Families Author(s): • Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, University of Washington • Jacob O. Wobbrock, University of Washington • Jon E. Froehlich, University of Washington Abstract We present two studies exploring how blind or low-vision (BLV) family members engage with their sighted children’s artwork, strategies to support understanding and interpretation, and the potential role of technology, such as AI, therein. Our first study involved 14 BLV individuals, and …
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award 2024
WheelPoser: Sparse-IMU Based Body Pose Estimation for Wheelchair Users Author(s): • Yunzhi Li, Carnegie Mellon University • Vimal Mollyn, Carnegie Mellon University • Kuang Yuan, Carnegie Mellon University • Patrick Carrington, Carnegie Mellon University Abstract Despite researchers having extensively studied various ways to track body pose on-the-go, most prior work does not take into account wheelchair users, leading to poor tracking performance. Wheelchair users could greatly benefit from this pose information …
Call for Nominations: SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award 2025
The SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award is presented every other year (in odd-numbered years) to the authors of an ASSETS conference paper that has had a significant impact on computing and information technology that addresses the needs of persons with disabilities. The award recognizes work that presents a significant innovation or contribution to knowledge that has proved influential. The selection committee will focus on a paper’s impact as judged by influence in the research community, …
Call for Papers ASSETS 2025
The call for papers for ASSETS’25 has been announced: https://assets25.sigaccess.org/call_for_papers.html
Chieko Asakawa: Outstanding Contribution 2024
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, …
January 2024 Newsletter
Issue 137 Preview: Welcome to the January 2024 issue of the ACM SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the ACM ASSETS 2023 doctoral consortium and travel award. Download: Get the full January 2024 Issue – https://dl.acm.org/toc/10.1145/3654768
Call for Papers ASSETS 2024
The call for papers for ASSETS’24 has been announced: https://assets24.sigaccess.org/authors/call-for-papers/
2023 SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award Winner
Empowering individuals with do-it-yourself assistive technology Author(s): Amy Hurst and Jasmine Tobias Description: The SIGACCESS community prides itself on directing the technology community’s understanding of disabled people and the role technology serves in their lives. Over the past decade, this community has diversified its view of assistive technologies and considered various ways that technology can serve individuals’ unique experiences of disability rather than generalizing across broad groups. Designing for the N of 1 is a unique …
SIGACCESS Best Student Paper Award 2023
Watch Your Language: Using Smartwatches to Support Communication Author(s) Humphrey Curtis, King’s College London Timothy Neate, King’s College London Abstract With an ageing population and increased prevalence of people living with complex communication needs there is a growing need to design scalable high-tech augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) apps to support agency and social participation. For end-users it is currently difficult to regulate the prominence of most mainstream high-tech AAC devices and tablet-based apps – …
SIGACCESS Best Paper Award 2023
VisPhoto: Photography for People with Visual Impairments via Post-Production of Omnidirectional Camera Imaging Author(s) Naoki Hirabayashi (Osaka Prefecture University), Masakazu Iwamura (Osaka Metropolitan University), Zheng Cheng (Osaka Prefecture University), Kazunori Minatani (National Center for University Entrance Examinations), and Koichi Kise (Osaka Metropolitan University) Abstract Many people with visual impairments would like to take photographs. However, they often have difficulty pointing the camera at the target. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a …