I just finished an inspiring day attending a capacity building for accessibility workshop at CMU organized by Carol Frieze and sponsored in part by Access Computing (who’s founder, Richard Ladner, who was the keynote speaker). At the event, Carol and Jeff Bigham were honored with the Access Computing Capacity Building Award, a well deserved honor.

It was wonderful to see the number of people in the room, and to realize just how strong and rich the accessibility community at CMU has become over the years since I arrived. Just to list a few of the faculty and post docs in the school of computer science who do accessibility research and were represented at the summit in some way, we have Henny Admoni, Chieko Asakawa, Jeff Bigham, Carol Frieze, Scott Hudson,  Jennifer Mankoff, Luz Rello, Aaron Steinfeld and Sidd Srinivasa. Many others work in the area, such as folks associated with the Quality of Life Center that recently ended (its leaders were Dan Siewiorek and Rory Cooper). Of course that brings up the Department of Rehabilitation Science and Technology at the University of Pittsburgh, a rich resource and partner in much of our disability work, which Rory is a member of.

I’ll close by quoting our keynote speaker, whose goal is to see not only increasing attention to accessibility research, but increasing inclusion of people with disabilities in computing:

Computing fields need more people with disabilities because their expertise and perspectives spark innovation