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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Summary Sentence: Exploring the Possibilities of Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Amy HurstSpeakers :
Amy Hurst
Title:
Exploring the Possibilities of Do-It-Yourself Assistive Technology
Abstract:
Assistive Technologies empower individuals to accomplish tasks they might not be able to do otherwise. Unfortunately, a large percentage of Assistive Technology devices end up unused or abandoned, leaving many people with Assistive Technology that is inappropriate for their needs. My students and I are working to help more people gain access to the Assistive Technology they need by empowering non-engineers to “Do-It-Yourself” (DIY) and create, modify, or build their own solutions. In this talk I will discuss our work understanding the potential for DIY in this domain, and present tools we have developed to support solving these accessibility challenges.
Bio:
Amy Hurst is an assistant professor of Human-Centered Computing in the Information Systems Department at UMBC and studies accessibility problems and builds assistive technologies. Most of her research focuses on solving accessibility problems through developing new assistive technologies and understanding diverse user’s abilities, habits, and preferences. She created the Prototyping and Design Lab ("the pad”) at UMBC, which is a collaborative making space. Amy received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII at Carnegie Mellon in 2010 with Scott Hudson and Jennifer Mankoff. Before that, she was an undergraduate in Computer Science at Georgia Tech and worked with Thad Starner in the Contextual Computing Group.
