Working with me

I welcome collaborators, students, and partners interested in making programming experiences accessible to join us! The first step for prospective students would be to read this. If you are an academic or industry professional interesting in working with us, please reach out!

How do I join your lab?

The first step to join my lab is to read this entire page. If you are a prospective PhD Student, please apply to the PhD programs offered either by the school of information or the computer science and engineering departments. Please make sure that your application materials are screen reader accessible. At this time, I am only able to co-advise students in CSE. If you are a Masters or Undergraduate student looking to explore if research is something you would enjoy doing, joining one of our ongoing projects may be a good starting point. we often post projects through UMSI’s Research Experience Development Program. We will update website with relevant opportunities as they become available. If you are slightly more serious about research, and are exploring the MTOP option, I am only able to consider MTOP students who have demonstrated accessibility knowledge through SI552 (Intro to Accessibility), SI539 (Intro to Web Development), or equivalent course material. Additionally, the 2 following criteria must be met:

  1. You should have worked with me as a member of an ongoing project, or,
  2. You should have completed at least 2 credits of Independent Study (SI691) with me where you demonstrated your ability to identify research problems in the broad theme of intelegent developer experiences.

How do you identify IDEAs worth pursuing?

We ask the following overarching questions:

  • Does this IDEA expand what counts as “development”, or who counts as a “developer”?
  • Is it making developer tools accessible?
  • Is it making the ability to create accessible digitally-facilitated human experiences accessible while giving users the ability to “program” or customize the experience?

While we ground our work in these overarching questions, we are open to pursuing research that is beyond the scope of these. We are a group driven by curiosity and the eagerness to positively impact the world so we do not want to let process get in the way of progress and miss out on IDEAs that we are excited about!

How do you pursue IDEAs?

Research is sometimes a very chaotic process that beautifully falls into place to make focused and impactful contributions. While it may be hard and impossible to describe this chaos, I will articulate some key factors we consider.

Methodology

Our work is grounded in human-centered research methods. This means that we are often conducting semi-structured interviews, usability studies of systems we develop, and ethnographic and auto-ethnographic investigations. We, however, treat research methodology as a means to an end. So we are often experimenting with novel research methodology if it may be suitable for a research contribution, even if it falls out of this scope. For example, we turned to large scale analysis combining web content accessibility guidelines with best practice to design accessible data visualizations to understand the accessibility of computational notebooks. We then developed a tool to automatically add alternative texts to images generated by Matplotlib, a need identified by our at-scale study. We used this tool and combined ML benchmarking with very light human-centered methodology to evaluate the ability of large language models to generate accurate alternative texts of charts. As another example, we used the right to information act (the equivalent of FOIA) to investigate the accessibility of ATM cash machines in India. We then combined our findings with existing payment infrastructure to propose an accessible solution to withdraw cash.

Impact

We are a research lab in an R1 research university conducting research of the highest quality. We give our work our best shot, frequently publish in top-tier HCI venues and are recognized with awards of different kinds. Here, I describe our approach towards impact beyond research artifacts.

As a group motivated to increase accessibility to development and developer tools, we incline towards translational impact. That is, we aspire to conduct research in ways that get our findings into the hands of developers quickly. We do this by making intentional engineering choices, contributing paper-adjacent artifacts, and finding opportunities to collaborate with industry partners who may have the right tools to impactfully disseminate our IDEAs to developers.

We sometimes also recognize that the urge to translate can get in the way of pursuing bluesky research ideas that could change the course of how we develop. We conduct empirical investigations and develop prototype systems when we identify such opportunities.