AccessComputing News - June 2018: All Articles

In the October 2017 edition of AccessComputing News, we announced the launch of our Resume Database. The AccessComputing Resume Database was created to help employers connect with individuals with disabilities in computing fields, such as computer science and information technology. Students and recent graduates who have disabilities can use the Resume Database to complete an online profile and upload their resume. Then, employers can search the database to locate potential interns and employees with disabilities who match their specific needs.

To date, 82 applicants have logged into the system to complete profiles and upload resumes, and 12 industry partners have created accounts in order to search for possible candidates. Profiles have been viewed 497 times and 19 resumes have been downloaded.

In order for students to use the Resume Database, they must first join the AccessComputing Team, a community of high school and college students with disabilities who are interested in computing fields. It's free to join, and Team membership has many benefits, including access to support staff and mentors and opportunities to engage in electronic mentoring, work-based learning, and other experiences that enhance college and career success in computing fields. Project staff help Team members locate paid internships and other work and research opportunities as they transition to and succeed in college, graduate school, and employment. To apply, complete an AccessComputing Team application.

In order for employers to access the Resume Database, they must be an AccessComputing Industry Partner. For additional information on becoming a Partner, please see our Industry Partners web page.

I am a graduating Ph.D. student in computer science, specializing in machine learning on social networks. I was very fortunate to receive the support of AccessComputing to attend the Web Conference in Lyon, France. Attending this conference allowed me to build new connections and collaborations during a crucial time when I transition to a career in industry research.

The Web Conference is a unique and valuable experience for students of many different backgrounds. In recent years, it has become a top venue for research in large-scale machine learning. However, it has strong communities in accessibility, security and privacy, and human-computer interaction. They also co-host the Web For All Conference, which focuses on developing accessible features and websites with respect to disability, socioeconomics, and other barriers. Due to this co-located event, the Web Conference itself also has better disability accommodation than similar top-tier conferences, both onsite and providing relevant local information. Outside of the Tapia Conference, I feel the Web Conference is the most diverse and valuable to students with disabilities who are in the relevant areas of computing.

The conference also hosts many sponsors and industry partners recruiting students at all levels. I was able to make direct contact with recruiters and researchers from Amazon, Facebook, Yahoo! Research, and Walmart Labs. Due to this, the conference is a great opportunity for masters and Ph.D. students, as well as undergraduates considering graduate school. There are several applied research tracks that are suitable for more junior students, including the "Web and Society" track, which focuses on empirical studies of websites and social networks, and recent emerging problems such as bias in machine learning, online abuse, and journalism and misinformation.

I presented my research in the BigNet International Workshop on Learning Representations for Big Networks. The workshop was very well-attended, in part due to notable keynote talks by Jon Kleinberg and Jure Leskovec. The research in this workshop focused on how to extract higher‑order information from networks (e.g. using deep learning) for recommender systems, knowledge-bases, or biological networks. These alternative representations mitigate some complexity of networks to build better predictive models, but are still not well-understood.

During my time in Lyon, I was largely focused on my work for the conference, and meeting a few closer colleagues. When I travel, I tend to meet many different groups of colleagues, and take time with them to see the city. These have been very important experiences and connections later on. However, the focus was very fruitful. This yielded good presentation slides, and a small breakthrough on research.

I am looking forward to attending future Web Conference iterations and facilitating junior students to attend as I work with the community in industry.

AccessComputing and AccessCSforAll PI Richard Ladner was recently honored with the Strache Leadership Award for his work in accessibility education and research. He got his award from the Center on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), which hosts the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference each year—the largest international conference to focus on assistive technology.

Ladner has been a leading researcher in the field of accessibility for over thirty years, and his work—both through our programs and in his teaching and research at the University of Washington—has increased access for people with disabilities to technology and computing careers. Ladner has been recognized numerous times throughout the years for all work he has done in the field of accessibility, winning the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), the 2008 Computing Research Association A. Nico Habermann Award, and the 2016 ACM SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility.

DO-IT Director Sheryl Burgstahler has also won the Strache Leadership Award, being recognized in 2012 for her leadership in promoting college success for students with disabilities and the universal design of instruction, technology, and services in higher education.

Learn more about his award and his background from the UW Allen School Newsletter or watch his acceptance of the award starting at 1:08 of the CSUN conference keynote. Congratulations, Richard!

When I first started doing research on the learning of computing, most of my exposure to the topic was through the excellent Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) International Computing Education Research (ICER) conference. As a small, inclusive community of rigorous learning science and education researchers, it was the best way for me to learn about the best work in the field. I had found my people.

From afar, the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) technical symposium was an entirely different beast. My first experience was disorienting: not only was it nearly as large as the ACM Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference, my first academic community, but it was and is still dominated by practicing teachers, not researchers. As a researcher, this is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that there’s an incredible group of teachers that come ready to learn and change their practices; that’s an unprecedented resource for research dissemination. Nearly everyone I talk to is someone who might adopt my lab’s ideas. However, I rarely get to engage in research conversations about learning to code. This has meant that attending SIGCSE has always felt like more of a dissemination event for me rather than an opportunity to learn about new discoveries and generate new research ideas.

However, this year’s SIGCSE was different than those of the past. Not only was there a dedicated research track for the first time, improving the quality of the research work and attracting more researchers than ever before, but the dialogue between teachers and researchers was more mature and urgent than ever. This was fueled by the national and international efforts at providing access to computing education to everyone, not just those who show up.

The conference was about more than just the ideas in computer science and our goals of spreading it. In fact, the more dominant theme was inclusion, which is at the heart of efforts to broaden participation in computing.

Brenda Wilkerson of AnitaB.org gave the first keynote of the conference. AnitaB envisions a future where “the people who imagine and build technology mirror the people and societies for whom they build it.” Brenda encouraged us to think of efforts to democratize ideas in computing not just as an education reform effort, but a revolution. Her argument was that if we change education to incorporate computer science (CS), and youth embrace CS, we won’t just change what they know and can do, we’ll change the face of who creates and designs technology, which will change technology, which will change the world. Brenda then talked about how to grow this revolution, reviewing her work in Chicago, where CS is now required across K-12.

I spent the rest of the first day of the conference also talking about inclusion. AccessComputing PI Richard Ladner, AccessComputing coordinator Brianna Blaser, and I kicked off the new Inclusion track for the conference on a session about incorporating ideas from accessibility into computer science classes. We shared ideas with our attendees and generated many interesting ideas about integration. For example, some who teach machine learning realized that there were fascinating ways to teach about bias in data by talking about how outliers can emerge from variation in ability. This variation shouldn’t be discarded; rather, machine learning algorithms should be robust to it, which actually means that diversity is a grand challenge for machine learning. Another example for data structures classes showcases how since screen readers require content to be serial or hierarchical, data must be structured into lists, regardless of how else it is structured. Attendees really wanted a website that conveyed all of these resources, which we are working on. Attendees also felt they needed some basic resources to develop their own expertise about accessibility, such as a book covering all of the foundations that they might also use for teaching.

These conversations mirrored the results of a survey that Kristen Shinohara, Saba Kawas, Richard Ladner, and I did to understand who is teaching accessibility in the US. We had a robust audience of 50 attendees with many interesting questions about the cultural changes that might be needed in computer science departments to incorporate even small amounts of accessibility into classes.

On Saturday, I helped lead an AccessComputing session on inclusive learning and teaching. Attendees came from high schools and universities, including some department chairs and even the College Board. Everyone came to learn what inclusion means and how to support it in classrooms and culture. We provided a few basics about universal design and norms, and then walked through some scenarios about students with physical disabilities, learning disabilities, and other issues of neurodiversity.

I had a great time this week in Baltimore. There’s so much energy and passion in this community, across all kinds of institutions and organizations. It’s not the normal research conference, but I think that’s a good thing: If only for a few days a year, leaving the ivory tower and contextualizing my research is invaluable to me and I hope to the world.

A full trip report with my thoughts on big ideas, programming, software engineering, mentorship, boot camps, ethics, and measurement is available on Medium.

The Autism at Work Summit 2018 was held April 24-26, 2018 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. The conference brought together about 180 participants from a wide range of stakeholders including representatives from companies that have autism hiring programs such as DXC.technology, Ernst & Young, Ford, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, and SAP. Other participants included representatives from companies considering starting autism hiring programs, employment support agencies representatives, university and industry researchers, government agency representatives, and autism advocates.

There were keynote presentations from Tom D’Eri who helped found the Rising Tide Car Wash company that primarily hires people with autism and the actress Holly Robinson Peete who formed the HollyRod Foundation that provides support and resources for families that experience autism. There were many panels about hiring, onboarding, and retaining workers with autism at all kind of skill levels including computing majors. There were two panels of people with autism—one about career paths and the other about women with autism.

The panel about career paths featured John Marble who co-founded the Autism Advantage Program, which trains and supports people with autism who are interested in data analysis or quality assurance. John described his personal path where his view of his own autism changed from stigma to a positive advantage.

The panel on women with autism included Sara Luterman the founder and editor of NOS Magazine, which focuses on news and commentary about neurodiversity culture and representation. Sara articulately described the autistic experience in a way that does not emphasize deficits, but positives.

The conference was very well run with lots of time for questions, answers, and discussion. This was the third Autism at Work Summit and another one is planned for next year.

Prior to the Summit, Richard attended the Autism at Work Research Workshop. A leading question for the researcher is what are the features of a successful autism at work program. Exploring answers to this question will lead to better models for successful autism at work programs.

Led by the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, the Information School, and DO-IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking, and Technology) at UW, AccessComputing is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Grant #CNS-0540615, CNS-0837508, CNS-1042260, CNS-1539179). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. For further information, to be placed on the mailing list, request materials in an alternate format, or to make suggestions for project publications or web pages, contact us:

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AccessComputing Principal Investigators:
Richard Ladner, PI
Sheryl Burgstahler, Co-PI
Amy J. Ko, Co-PI
Jacob O. Wobbrock, Co-PI
Brianna Blaser, Project Coordinator
Kayla Brown, Project Coordinator
Lyla Crawford, Internal Evaluator