SIGACCESS Newsletter

André Rodrigues, Editor-in-Chief, University of Lisbon, afrodrigues@fc.ul.pt

Inside this Issue

Welcome to the June 2022 issue of the ACM SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the VizWiz Grand Challenge Workshop at CVPR, sponsored by SIGACCESS, and an article by Jane Marshall et al., summarising the outcomes of community workshops exploring the use of creative digital technologies in aphasia rehabilitation.

VIZWIZ GRAND CHALLENGE WORKSHOP AT CVPR 2022

In this article, Daniela Massiceti , Samreen Anjum, and Danna Gurari provide an overview of the VizWiz Grand Challenge Workshop at the IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference (CVPR 2022). The workshop focused on charting and celebrating progress on accessibility-related AI challenges. Overall, the workshop had ten invited speakers, total of 72 teams participated in three AI challenges, and nine teams further discussed their work in posters and extended abstract presentations.

USING CREATIVE DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES IN APHASIA REHABILITATION

In this article, Jane Marshall et al., present four novel technologies that were developed in the INCA Project (Inclusive Digital Content for People with Aphasia). The article discusses the findings of nine community workshops exploring the accessibility of the technologies and their ability to promote creative expression.

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

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SIGACCESS Officers

Matt Huenerfauth, Chair. Matt Huenerfauth is a Professor and the Director of the iSchool (School of Information) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). He studies the design of technology to benefit people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing or who have low written-language literacy, and his team of research students operates bilingually in English and American Sign Language (ASL).

Kathleen McCoy, Vice-Chair. Kathleen McCoy is a professor in the Department of Computer & Information Sciences. Her research focuses broadly on accessibility for people with disabilities with projects in several different areas. She has a special emphasis on applications of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing to accessibility issues.

Karyn Moffatt, Secretary Treasurer. Karyn Moffatt is an Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University and the Canada Research Chair in Inclusive Social Computing. She leads the Accessible Computing Technologies Research Group where she studies how computing applications can be designed to be more inclusive of diverse needs and preferences across the lifespan, especially with respect to supporting social engagement and interaction.

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 currently a Software Engineer at Google, working in the field of natural language understanding and information retrieval. He completed his PhD at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he specialized in accessibility for people with disabilities, human-computer interaction and computational linguistics. He is interested in building machine learning (ML) systems that model human communication with a goal to enhance human-to-human or human-to-machine interaction.