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!

Note for prospective PhD applicants: Please see the “FAQ for prospective PhD applicants” section at the end of this page for details about applying, and expectations.

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.

FAQ for prospective PhD applicants (FA 2026)

How can I contribute to the lab’s research agenda?

This is a great question! As a PhD Student, you are expected to become an independent researcher while being aligned with the lab’s mission and goals. This is necessary for multiple reasons. Some of these are:

  • To facilitate opportunities to mentor you towards becoming an independent researcher.
  • To enable collaborations among the group
  • To make strong contributions that have a real impact and stand the test of time.

As a prospective student, you may want to demonstrate that you will add value to the overarching questions with a focus on accessibility:

  • Who counts as a programmer?
  • What do new interaction techniques to accessibly program look like?
  • What counts as programming?

You must demonstrate deep thought and your competency to help answer these questions through your personal and research statements.

What does “contributing” mean?

As a PhD Student, you are expected to contribute in the following non-exhaustive ways.

  • Answer critical questions through qualitative enquiry, data driven studies or benchmark contributions.
  • Advance accessible computing through prototyped new interaction techniques
  • Inform accessibility practice through practical guidelines
  • Have real-world impact through open source tools.

Please read the notes against the question about impact below.

In addition to your intellectual contributions, you are expected to:

  • Uphold the collaborative and supportive spirit of the group, and the school.
  • Approach your research with a disability justice mindset. If this word is unfamiliar, the simplest way to self-assess if you align with this is to very critically reflect upon your motivations to pursue accessibility research.

Do you (Venkatesh) code?

The answer to that is very project specific. Rest assured I care very much about technical details behind systems and quality engineering so you may find me engaging deeply with implementation details and reviewing your code.

I (prospective PhD applicant) do not know how to code. Should I still apply?

Yes! Please apply! As we work on developer experiences, some understanding of or ability to understand developers and software development will be helpful. We are witnessing a possible shift in how we will be programming so learning how to effectively use conversational programming tools like GitHub Copilot or Replit, and practicing this skill through the development of accessibility-focused prototypes is a great exercise if you want to contribute technical artifacts. My lab is constantly experimenting with conversational programming tools through research, and informal hackathon-style activities (we are building an accessible time polling tool). My students in my accessibility class have learned how to prototype accessible interactions through conversational programming. My lab also tries to answer pertinent questions about who or what counts as programming so those would be other prompts to identify overlapping interests. Here are a few resources if you would like to learn how to use conversational programming tools:

Should I apply to CSE, School of Information, or both?

This is a very personal choice that takes into account many factors such as the financial costs associated with application, energy you are willing to spend crafting research material, and personal interest. Logistically, I can advise students both in School of Information (solo and co-advising) and CSE (co-advising only). I encourage you to read this helpful article on why you might want to study information, and another article comparing an information degree to one in computer science.

Can I get in touch with you to have a conversation about applying to join your lab?

If you will be at ASSETS, please reach out and indicate in your subject line that you will be at ASSETS. More generally, I can not guarantee that I will be able to respond to individual emails. If you decide to email me, I ask that you send precise emails that demonstrate that you have made a good-faith attempt to identify our possible interest overlap.