Ability
Empowering people with long-term, temporary, or situational disabilities
Projects
Web search is an important modern literacy skill, necessary for fully participating in many aspects of society including education, employment, commerce, and entertainment. However, web search is particularly challenging for people with print disabilities, such as visual or cognitive impairments.…
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This project considers how to design emerging Mixed Reality technologies (including AR and VR) so that they are usable by and useful to people of all abilities. Too often, the accessibility of technology to people with disabilities is an afterthought…
This project examines how workplaces and productivity tools can be made more inclusive to people of all abilities, including tools for remote work.
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This project examines issues around AI FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) and Responsible AI, with a particular focus on how AI systems impact people with disabilities. This includes ensuring that mainstream AI tools are inclusively designed such that they…
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) is a degenerative neuromuscular disease; people with late-stage ALS typically retain cognitive function, but lose the motor ability to speak, relying on gaze-controlled AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) devices for interpersonal interactions. State-of-the-art AAC technologies used…
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The Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) project in Microsoft Research aims to enable BCI for the general population. This means non-intrusive methods, fewer number of electrodes and custom-designed signal picking devices. We go towards interactive BCI, which means response times within seconds…
Caption Crawler is a plug-in for the Edge and Chrome web browsers that provides additional information about images for screen reader users. Many images on the web lack captions (i.e., alt text). When a webpage loads, Caption Crawler identifies images…
Digital imagery pervades modern life. More than a billion images per day are produced and uploaded to social media sites, and we also encounter digital images within websites, apps, digital documents, and eBooks. Engaging with digital imagery is part of…
Established:
We now live in a data-driven world, where big data are generated and captured by computing devices and sensors on and around us. As critical decisions are made based on data, understanding data has become a core part of information…