In the late 2000s, one touchscreen device was suddenly able to handle a person’s calls, texts, music, email and web navigation. Information School Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock and then-Ph.D. student Shaun Kane recognized that as smartphones revolutionized technology’s place in people’s lives, those with disabilities were at risk of being left behind.
Through interviews and a diary study, they studied how people with visual and motor impairments used and adapted mobile devices to match their abilities. Their team’s resulting paper, was recently honored with the 10-year Lasting Impact Award at the International Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’25), the leading conference for researchers in the field of accessible computing.
For the study that led to the 2009 paper, the research team interviewed 20 participants with visual and motor disabilities and asked about their use of mobile devices and the accessibility challenges they faced. The results showed that people with disabilities had to find ways to adapt to inaccessible technology, such as memorizing device functions and using multiple devices. The research team, which also included computer science Professor Richard Ladner and Ph.D. student Chandrika Jayant, developed guidelines for more accessible and empowering mobile device design.
“This paper was really very much an iSchool-flavored project,” said Wobbrock. “You're doing the kind of on-the-ground social science of understanding people and their use of and relationship to technology and how it's affecting their life.”
At the time, Wobbrock said, most research on accessible computing focused on desktop and laptop computers.
“It was a fairly new idea to consider that accessibility really should be extended to all manner of devices, large and small, and that with increasing miniaturization of devices, they were likely to only become more inaccessible to people,” he said.
The SIGACCESS award is the fourth 10-year lasting impact award that Wobbrock has received in recent years. He received lasting impact awards at ICMI 2022 and UIST 2024, both for work on gesture recognizers, which are software algorithms that interpret physical movements such as a finger swiping a touchscreen or drawing a circle. Wobbrock also received the same SIGACCESS Lasting Impact Award in 2019 for “Slide Rule,” a paper also led by Shaun Kane that focused on mobile device accessibility.
For “Slide Rule,” the researchers hacked an early iPod Touch device and demonstrated how its screen could be made accessible to blind people. They created the first finger-driven screen reader, a series of intuitive flick gestures for navigation, and an accurate method of tapping targets that allowed the user’s finger to stay on the screen without having to lift from the screen.
Where “Slide Rule” was mainly focused on improving technology, “Freedom to Roam” broke new ground by uncovering a range of problems that people with disabilities faced.
“The thing that I really enjoyed about the process of doing this research and writing this paper was it was mostly talking to people and listening to them and learning,” Kane said. He noted that the paper’s greatest impact was the further research it inspired. Accessibility features are now standard on iPhones and Android devices.
“I think if you look at the work that came after, much of that does a better job of pursuing accessibility,” said Kane, an iSchool Distinguished Alumni Award recipient who now works as a research scientist at Google. “I think it's really led to some great work from other researchers.”