Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Designing Accessible Systems for Users with Multiple Impairments: Grand Challenges and Opportunities for Future Research

Funding

Chris Creed is an Associate Professor in Human-Computer Interaction at Birmingham City University (UK) where he leads the HCI Research Group. His core research interest is around the design and development of assistive technology for disabled people (across a range of impairments). He is currently leading multiple funded research projects focused around accessibility such as investigating new interface techniques for facilitating creative work via gaze/speech interaction (supported through an Adobe Fund for Design grant), exploring the development of inclusive AR/VR experiences (funded by a Meta/Facebook research award), making coding more accessible for people with physical impairments (which has received support from a Google Inclusion Research Award and a Microsoft “AI for Accessibility” grant), and investigating the potential of wearable technology to support young people with special needs (e.g. ADHD) within residential care (funded through Innovate UK). Dr Creed’s research is multidisciplinary in nature and has been conducted in close partnership with national charities, disability and accessibility organisations, special needs colleges, large arts/cultural partners, and disabled people. Raymond Holt is a Lecturer in Product Design in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds (UK), where he is a member of the Institute of Design, Robotics and Optimisation, the Immersive Cognition Lab and the Centre for Disability Studies. His core research interests are the study of haptic perception and prehension and the cocreation of assistive and rehabilitation technologies with users. He has led co-creation activities on two rehabilitation robotics projects funded by the National Institute for Health Research, and led the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Facilitating Meaningful Play for Disabled Children through Participatory Design. He has recently been part of the European Commission funded project SUITCEYES (http://suitceyes.eu., where he led activities on the sensing and navigation elements, and is currently extending this work as part of the Wellcome Trust-funded Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures project (http://itdfproject.org.. Stuart Murray is Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English, and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, at the University of Leeds. His research focuses on representation of disability and technologized embodiment and the critical/theoretical contexts for research into disability and health. His last book is Disability and the Posthuman: Body, Technologies, and Cultural Futures (Liverpool UP, 2020) and his new study Medical Humanities and Disability Studies: In/Disciplines will be published by Bloomsbury next year. He is the PI and works alongside Raymond Holt on the 5-year research project ‘Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures’ and Joint-PI on the 3-year ‘LivingBodiesObjects: Technology and the Spaces of Health’, both funded by the Wellcome Trust.