SIGACCESS Newsletter
André Rodrigues, Editor-in-Chief, University of Lisbon, afrodrigues@fc.ul.pt
Inside this Issue
Welcome to the June 2021 issue of the ACM SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the best virtual ASSETS yet, with an article dedicated to last year UX panel about "Lockdown Experiences". The third article presents the SONAAR project which recently won the Delegates award for best demo at W4A. Be sure to check out the last article presenting the University of Washington Center for Research and Education in Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE).ASSETS 2020 Overview
The first article, written by Hugo Nicolau, (Program Chair), Karyn Moffatt (Program Chair) and Tiago Guerreiro (General Chair) provides an overview of ASSETS'20.
ASSETS 2020 UX PANEL REPORT: "LOCKDOWN EXPERIENCES"
The article written by Abi Roper and Sergio Mascetti highlights the organization and outcomes of the User Experience panel at ASSETS 2020.
Suggesting Text Alternatives for Images in Social Media
In this article, Letícia Pereira et al. present SONAAR, a project funded by the European Commission aiming to support the authoring and consumption of accessible social media content. Its demo recently won the Delegate Award at W4A 2021.
THE CENTER FOR RESEARCH AND EDUCATION ON ACCESSIBLE TECHNOLOGY AND EXPERIENCES (CREATE)
In this article, Jennifer Mankoff and Jacob O. Wobbrock present The University of Washington Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE). CREATE’s mission is to make technology accessible and to make the world accessible through technology.
About the Newsletter
SIGACCESS is a special interest group of ACM on Accessible Computing. The SIGACCESS Newsletter is a regular online publication of SIGACCESS that includes content of interest to the community. To join SIGACCESS, please visit our website www.sigaccess.org
Want to see your article featured in the next issue?
Contributions and inquiries can be emailed to editors_sigaccess@sigaccess.acm.org.
We encourage a wide variety of contributions, such as letters to the editor, technical papers, short reports, reviews of papers or products, abstracts, book reviews, conference reports and/or announcements, interesting web page URLs, local activity reports, and so forth. Actually, we solicit almost anything of interest to our readers and community.
You may publish your work here before submitting it elsewhere. We are a very informal forum for sharing ideas with others who have common interests. Anyone interested in editing a special issue on an appropriate topic should contact the editor. As a contributing author, you retain copyright to your article and ACM will refer requests for republication directly to you. By submitting your article, you hereby grant to ACM the following non-exclusive, perpetual, worldwide rights: to publish in print on condition of acceptance by the editor; to digitize and post your article in the electronic version of this publication; to include the article in the ACM Digital Library and in any Digital Library related services; to allow users to make a personal copy of the article for non-commercial, educational or research purposes.
SIGACCESS Officers
Shari Trewin, Chair. Shari is a researcher in the Accessibility Leadership team at IBM Research, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing (SIGACCESS). Her research interests lie in accessibility, usability, and artificial intelligence technologies. Recently she has been working on AI Fairness for People with Disabilities, automation of accessibility test and repair, better prioritization of accessibility isses found by tools, enhancing automated captions, and an accessibility ontology for industry.
Matt Huenerfauth, Vice-Chair. Matt is a professor in the Golisano College of Computer and Information Sciences at the The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he is a member of the faculty of the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies and the Ph.D. program in Computer and Information Sciences. Huenerfauth and his students conduct research on computer accessibility for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing, assistive technology for people with disabilities, human computer interaction, and computational linguistics.
Jinjuan Heidi Feng, Secretary Treasurer. Heidi is a professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department and the director of the School of Emerging Technologies at Towson University. She received a Ph.D. in Information Sciences from UMBC in 2005. She conducts research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, universal accessibility, Health-informatics, and usable and accessible Security. She works closely with national and local communities to improve the quality of life for people with disabilities through information technology.
André Rodrigues, Newsletter Editor. André Rodrigues is a researcher at LASIGE at the Universidade de Lisboa. He has dedicated himself to developing and evaluating mobile services, applications and platforms for a variety of contexts and user groups (e.g. people with visual and/or motor impairments, people experiencing homelessness), always working closely with and/or within the communities he engages with. He is a CS researcher focused on HCI with a particular interest in how technology can and is leveraged in accessibility, health, and gaming.
Sushant Kafle, Information Director. Sushant is a Ph.D. student in Computing and Information Science at the Golisano College of Computing and Information Science, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) under the advisement of Prof. Matt Huenerfauth. His research aims to inform the evaluation and the design of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology for use in captioning for people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH).