SIGACCESS Newsletter
Jared Duval, Editor-in-Chief, Northern Arizona University, Jared.Duval@nau.edu
Inside this Issue
Welcome to the June 2023 issue of the ACM SIGACCESS newsletter. This issue highlights the ASSETS 2022 conference and includes an article by Arthur Theil titled "Challenges in Conducting Accessibility Reserach with Users with Multiple, Profound, or Complex Disabilities" that summarizes disucssions from a workshop held at ASSETS in 2022.
Overview of ASSETS 2022
In this overview of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility held in Athens, Greece, between October 23rd and 26th, Stephanie Ludi and Kristen Shinohara share highlights from their role as Co-Technical Program Chairs. The overview provides a day-by-day summary of the technical program, a highlight of the amazing keynote speakers, a breakdown of the submissions, details about the Student Research Competition, a list of the inaugural Workshops, a recap of the Doctoral Consortium, a synopsis of the awards, and acknowledgments of the significant effort needed from all involved to make ASSETS 2022 a wonderful success.
Challenges in Conducting Accessibility Research with Users with Multiple, Profound, or Complex Disabilities
In this article, Arthur Theil presents a summary of discussions initiated during the ASSETS 2022 workshop titled "Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Designing Accessible Systems for Users with Multiple Impairments: Grand Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research" which was one of the five workshops in the inaugural year. The article advocates the need for future research to include people with multiple, profound, or complex disabilities and discusses grand challenges, including standards related to methods, terminology, complexity, and plurality of needs, resources, and expertise that the field should address moving forward by using inter-and-multidisciplinary approaches.
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. 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.
Jared Duval, Newsletter Editor. Jared is a assistant professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems at Northern Arizona University. He is the director of the Playful Health Technology Lab. He received a Ph.D. in Computational Media from University of California, Santa Cruz in 2022. He conducts research in the area of Human-Computer Interaction, Assistive Technology, and Serious Games for Health.
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.