Ability
Empowering people with long-term, temporary, or situational disabilities
News & features
Microsoft Ability Initiative: A collaborative quest to innovate in image captioning for people who are blind or with low vision
| Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft is committed to pushing the boundaries of technology to improve and positively influence all parts of society. Recent advances in deep learning and related AI techniques have resulted in significant strides in automated image captioning. However, current image captioning…
Awards | User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)
Meredith Ringel Morris receives UIST 2018 Lasting Impact Award
Meredith (Merrie) Ringel Morris, a Principal Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research, received the UIST 2018 Lasting Impact Award for her 2007 paper, co-authored by Eric Horvitz, entitled: “SearchTogether: An interface for collaborative web search.” The award was presented at the 31st ACM User…
Reflections – the Grace Hopper Conference past and present
| Meredith Ringel Morris
This year I will be attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), where I will be part of a panel discussion on the topic, “Will Artificial Intelligence Eliminate Accessibility Barriers?” (at noon on Wednesday, Sept. 26th). I’ve…
Advancing accessibility with Dr. Meredith Ringel Morris
Episode 25, May 23, 2018 – Dr. Morris gives us some fascinating insights into the world of “ability,” talks about how technology is augmenting not only sensory and motor abilities, but cognitive and social abilities as well, and shares how…
HEARING IS BELIEVING – Researchers’ innovation provides a richer web-browsing experience for people who are blind
Imagine for a moment that you are blind and are navigating the web using a screen reader to hear websites rather than see them. Imagine that the article you have navigated to includes images. To understand the content and significance,…
Touching the Virtual: How Microsoft Research is Making Virtual Reality Tangible
“Ask yourself how you really want to interact with virtual objects? The simple answer is that we want to handle them as if they are real, just reach out a hand to grasp them, pick them up, feel what they’re…
Awards | Northwest Access Fund
Seeing AI project team honored with Best Practices Award for a Large Business
The Northwest Access Fund honored the Seeing AI project team with the Best Practices Award for a Large Business. Seeing AI is a smartphone camera application for the blind and low-vision community that harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to turn the…
CHI Part 2: Creating technologies that enhance lives in the areas of health and eye tracking
By Justin Cranshaw, Researcher, Microsoft Research With its focus on the relationships between people and computation, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) excels at creating technologies that marry human skills with computational functionality, to enable outcomes neither humans nor computers…