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Aaleyah Lewis

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Aaleyah is a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She is advised by Dr. James Fogarty and Dr. Jennifer Mankoff. She completed her undergraduate studies at UMBC, where she majored in Computer Science. She is a GEM fellow and ARCS Foundation Scholar.

Her research in accessibility explores the opportunities and tensions in improving AI-based technologies to equitably support people with disabilities who hold intersecting marginalized identities. She is also interested in communication access for multilingual people with disabilities who have diverse communication patterns. You can find Aaleyah’s work at: https://aaleyahlewis.github.io/.

Featured image for a research paper titled "I Don’t Trust it, but I Use it." A diverse group of disabled people with various disabilities—including wheelchair users, a person with a white cane, and a person with a prosthetic limb—walk across a narrow tightrope over a dark chasm. They are moving toward a glowing cloud labeled "Generative AI" filled with digital interfaces. The scene illustrates the "balancing act" between AI-driven accessibility and the risks of trust and privacy.

“I Don’t Trust it, but I Use it”: Navigating Trust, Privacy, and Identity in Disabled People’s Use of Generative AI

An example of consequence calculus, showing stacked bar graphs weighing the potential paths towards access through consequence calculus for each tool and contextual factor. The cane has a low safety score, a high affordability score, and a low social acceptability score. the bus has a medium safety score, medium-high affordability score, and medium acceptability score. The rideshare has a high safety score, very low affordability score, and medium acceptability score. When combined, the cane emerges as the most affordable option, the rideshare is the best for safety, and the bus is the highest-scoring overall.

What Do We Mean by “Accessible”

Stylized illustration of a person with robotic features sitting at a café table, looking at a phone, with a glowing light around them. Four human figures sit at surrounding tables, engaged in conversation. The central figure has a robot icon on their chest and a speech bubble with the same icon, symbolizing artificial intelligence or feeling like a robot in a social setting.

Autoethnographic Insights from Neurodivergent GAI “Power Users”

Figure 1: The flowchart offers a map through the results. At the top we have communication access, which branches into two directions: 1) access needs (e.g., caption use, speechreading) and 2) language landscape (e.g., frequency, context, comfort, overall repertoire). There are two way arrows between these two, representing the question 'How do these interact/inform/shape each other?'. Below the question, as answer we have two groups: first, factors for a particular langauge (fluency, linguistic affordances, cultural perceptions) and second, practices across languages (translation, transliteration, translanguaging).

Toward Language Justice

Kate Glazko

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Kate is a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. She is advised by Professor Jennifer Mankoff. She completed her undergraduate studies at USC, where she double-majored in Computer Science and Business Administration, as well as received her master’s degree in Computer Science. She is an NSF CSGrad4US fellow.

She is interested in studying the intersection of digital and physical technologies that empower those with disabilities or illnesses. Her recent research focuses on generative AI and accessibility, seeking to gain a deeper understanding of the opportunities for improving access as well as identifying areas for improvement.

Her website is here: https://kateglazko.com

Iconic text with a lock (implying inaccessible) next to simple white on black text (implying accessible)

Organizational Plain Language Priorities

Images from an embroidered version of "where the wild things are" showing a wooden boat floating on waves with shells as embroidered beads, and a wooden bed frame with a flannel quilt and a fox-shaped head floating to its left.

Embroidering Tactile Graphics

Stylized illustration of a person with robotic features sitting at a café table, looking at a phone, with a glowing light around them. Four human figures sit at surrounding tables, engaged in conversation. The central figure has a robot icon on their chest and a speech bubble with the same icon, symbolizing artificial intelligence or feeling like a robot in a social setting.

Autoethnographic Insights from Neurodivergent GAI “Power Users”

A purple freestanding lace piece on top of a jar lid, adding a rigid, grippable base.

Shaping Lace

An AI generated decorative image of a person standing alone outside of a corporate boardroom, excluded.

Identifying and improving disability bias in GPT-based resume screening

Two AI-generated images show different interpretations of a doll-sized “crocheted lavender husky wearing ski goggles,” including one pictured outdoors and one against a wooden background.

Generative Artificial Intelligence’s Utility for Accessibility

Jerry Cao

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Jerry is a PhD student at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He conducts research in the Make4All Lab and UbiComp Lab, where he’s advised by Jennifer Mankoff and Shwetak Patel.

His research focuses on improving healthcare accessibility by creating assistive technologies using digital fabrication and wearable sensing. He also works in the pure fabrication space, creating novel 3D-printable sensors and optimizing the strength of 3D-printed parts.

Website: https://jerrycao22.github.io/

Banner image for SensiPrint showing a design tool where users can select parts of a mesh to augment, examples of 3D printing directly on objects, and example demos of 3D printed pressure sensors.

Demonstrating SensiPrint: 3D-Printed Soft Foams for Physical Augmentation and Sensing

Images from an embroidered version of "where the wild things are" showing a wooden boat floating on waves with shells as embroidered beads, and a wooden bed frame with a flannel quilt and a fox-shaped head floating to its left.

Embroidering Tactile Graphics

“Policies and laws” are social determinants of health for access to telehealth care. “Policies and laws” intervene with the status quo and influence digital determinants of health for telehealth care; therefore, it can be considered a digital determinants of health of telehealth.

Telehealth and Digital Health Innovations

A table with an assortment of cane tips, cane handles and feet in various shapes.

“A Tool for Freedom”

Model of an automatically-generated flat splint with breathing holes, and the same splint after it has been printed, heated, and shaped around a thumb

Domain Specific Metaheuristic Optimization

A picture of two people wearing 3D printed PPE. On the left is a face shield (42.2% of submissions) and on the right a facemask (28.4% of submissions).

Rapid Convergence: The Outcomes of Making PPE during a Healthcare Crisis

Optimized tactile map

Maptimizer