March 2022: Designing Systems to Enable Accessible User Experiences

We’re excited to announce that our February Meetup with with Patrick Carrington has been rescheduled to March!

—–

Mobile and wearable technologies offer the promise of great opportunity, connection, new experiences, and natural interactions. However, what happens when these designs do not fully consider the relationship between people and the devices they use? For example, wheelchair users often use and carry multiple mobile computing devices, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. However, due to the assumptions many of these devices make about our abilities they remain challenging to use. My research group focuses on supporting the broad range of humans with diverse abilities as they interact with the world and people around them. Our ongoing research aims to support and empower people with disabilities as they engage in a range of activities, including mobility, social interactions, and competitive sports.

Patrick Carrington

Patrick Carrington is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and his research emphasizes the design of systems to support people with diverse abilities. He studies mobile and wearable technology, builds assistive devices, and explores how to create experiences that support empowerment, independence, and improved quality of life. His current projects span topics including accessing digital content and media, transportation and mobility, and developing technologies for athletes with disabilities.

Please register for this free event

March 24, 2022
12:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

January event: Practical Advice for Accessible Design

One of the most challenging design spaces in software is accessibility.  Users with disabilities face challenges reading, navigating, and interacting with the modern Web applications. Even with the help of assistive technology (AT) they face renewed discrimination by being denied the same experience in social networking, video sharing, and other applications that are critical to our web citizenship.

As the population ages, access legislation strengthens throughout North America, and AT users become more vocal, accessibility considerations become harder to ignore. For user experience and design professionals, this should be a call to action!  The reality is designing accessible applications is foreign to many of us, highly nuanced, technically challenging, and difficult to assess/critique.

This presentation by Ali Ghassemi and Dariusz Grabka of Desire2Learn will seek to make accessibility a lot less scary, and introduce you to some best practices that the company has developed for designing accessible web software.

This month’s event is being held at the office of Desire2Learn, located in suite 400 at 151 Charles Street West, in Kitchener. That’s the digital Hub in the old Lang Tannery building — use the entrance beside Balzac’s Coffee. There’s parking off Charles Street.

Please register if you want to attend, as space is limited for what is sure to be a great event.