A Journey in Accessibility: Digital-World to Real-World

Progress in accessibility technology has dramatically improved the quality of life for people with disabilities. The SIGACCESS community has played a crucial role in this progress since its establishment in the late 1990s. This community connect researchers and share, with the world, innovative ideas based on the latest science and technology. My journey with SIGACCESS began in 1998, inspired by the technical challenges encountered during the development of the world's first practical voice web browser, the “IBM Home Page Reader”. This work later received the SIGACCESS ASSETS Paper Impact Award in 2013. After more than a decade of research in digital accessibility, I shifted my focus to a daunting, unsolved challenge: enabling independent movement in urban environments for people with visual impairments—the challenge of real-world accessibility. In this address, I will give a brief overview of my research in digital accessibility, look at my work on an autonomous navigation robot, the “AI suitcase”, and note the importance of social acceptance to successfully implement such new technology. I will then address the tremendous potential we SIGACCESS members possess, to practically apply the latest science and technology research, thereby steadily improving the quality of life for all people.