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.

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

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 and critical challenge distinguishing accessibility from other fields because all disability is individual. Perhaps the greatest impact of Hurst and Tobias’ paper is the insight that we can look to the creativity of disabled people themselves for novel and impactful solutions.

By centering the role disabled people play in acquiring and designing these technologies, Hurst and Tobias have inspired a diverse line of research. This paper was instrumental in starting a new direction of accessibility research and making accessibility a core topic intersecting other areas of HCI, such as design and digital fabrication. 

Paper year: 2011

Abstract: Unfortunately, a large percentage of Assistive Technology devices that are purchased (35% or more) end up unused or abandoned [7,10], leaving many people with Assistive Technology that is inappropriate for their needs. Low acceptance rates of Assistive Technology occur for many reasons, but common factors include 1) lack of considering user opinion in selection, 2) ease in obtaining devices, 3) poor device performance, and 4) changes in user needs and priorities [7]. We are working to help more people gain access to the Assistive Technology they need by empowering non-engineers to “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) and create, modify, or build. This paper illustrates that it is possible to custom-build Assistive Technology, and argues why empowering users to make their own Assistive Technology can improve the adoption process (and subsequently adoption rates). We discuss DIY experiences and impressions from individuals who have either built Assistive Technology before, or rely on it. We found that increased control over design elements, passion, and cost motivated individuals to make their own Assistive Technology instead of buying it. We discuss how a new generation of rapid prototyping tools and online communities can empower more individuals. We synthesize our findings into design recommendations to help promote future DIY-AT success.

Full paper: Download Full Paper Here

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 – they are socially conspicuous, offer poor portability, are aesthetically unconsidered, and obstruct vital non-verbal communication pathways. In response to this, we leverage participatory design techniques to design and evaluate two discreet and inconspicuous AAC smartwatch apps. We engage with a community of people living with the language impairment aphasia, to collaboratively build and iterate both a smartwatch app for ‘public’ communication: Watch Out and ‘private’ cognitive support: Watch In. Following this, we evaluate both apps during an experience prototyping workshop with an actor and subsequent focus group. We report results from communication interactions with both apps, interviews and feedback responses. Participants were not only successful in using both AAC smartwatch apps but, critically, the wearable and discreet intervention did not restrict users’ agency and non-verbal communication.

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 novel photo-taking system called VisPhoto. Unlike conventional methods, VisPhoto generates a photograph in post-production. When the shutter button is pressed, VisPhoto captures an omnidirectional camera image that contains the surrounding scene of the camera. In post-production, the system outputs a cropped region as a “photograph” that satisfies the user’s preference. We conducted an experiment consisting of two parts. First, 24 people with visual impairments took photographs with a genuine iPhone camera app, a conventional method, and VisPhoto. Second, 20 sighted people evaluated the quality of the photographs. The experimental results showed that the participants with visual impairments preferred to use VisPhoto to take photographs of difficult targets, whereas they preferred the conventional method for easy targets. Moreover, we revealed that their preferences for photo-taking methods were influenced by the participants’ needs and values about photography and their confidence in their photographic abilities.

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

n 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.

Download: Get the full June 2023 Issue