(Week: 7) Abstract

Last revised date: 2/3/2026

Overview

Propose a project relevant to accessibility.

Required Competencies

When you turn in this homework, also turn in these competencies

Assignment Details

Form a group

The final project is a group assignment and requires forming groups of 2-4 people who can all attend the same section. (You don’t necessarily need to be registered for the same section, but you must all be able to attend the same one.)

Pick a project

In this phase of the final project, you will propose a specific project idea that you come up with. Most projects fall into one of three categories:

  1. Make the world more accessible in a way that reflects a deep understanding of the needs and goals of disabled people by creating a new solution to an accessibility barrier. Examples include Complexion Cupid, which allows individuals with color blindness to upload an image of their skin, and provides a makeup foundation match; PadMap: Accessible Map for Menstrual Products, which ensures that anywhere on campus, people can search up the closest free menstrual products to them and get there in an accessible way (Source) and Displaced: navigating third places and chronic illness (now published as part of “Navigating Illness, Finding Place: Enhancing the Experience of Place for People Living with Chronic Illness”)
  2. Make the world more accessible by ensuring that a commonly used digital thing is compliant with WCAG and thus inclusive of disabled people. Examples from past offerings include improving the 331 class website and improving the KBCS website; adding new accessibility and disability-relevant features to Alovoa, an open-source dating app; Alti Discord Bot, which automatically generates alt text for any image that gets uploaded onto Discord (Demo).
  3. Create something that can support critique of accessibility and accessible practices using a design noir approach: “Populated with props to provoke debate, prototypes to embody unfamiliar ethical values, and fictive scenarios to surface the complexities and strangeness of human behavior.”

Some projects may span or resist these categories – for example an accessible Manga Reader is making something digital more accessible (Manga), but arguably it is going beyond WCAG compliance to innovating new tools and techniques, and in the process meeting the needs and goals of people’s whole selves. Others of this sort include making Arduino programming more accessible by visualizing output from its sensors accessible and creating tactile schematics for circuits. Similarly SpeechIT is helping to make presenting more accessible, but this is not about WCAG compliance, and it indirectly improves the experience of disabled people. We are happy to accept projects in these sorts of liminal spaces. Another example of this is a project improving MatPlotALT, a small python package to generate and surface alt text for matplotlib figures (Resulted in a publication and open source release).

Here are more examples of final projects from the 2024 (full list) and 2023 (full list) offerings.

Do Your Research (Mix)

It is not feasible to do a full iterative design cycle in this project (and not necessarily an ethical use of the time of people with disabilities). Instead you should use a combination of background research and a first person account as a basis for your proposal.

Find a First Person Account (Group)

In choosing this project, you should draw from first person accounts. If you cannot find first person commentary on the topic, please reach out to the course staff for help. We can help point you at resources such as research papers that have interviews of people with disabilities in them if something isn’t available on sites like TikTok and YouTube.

Do some Background Research (Individual)

It is also important to understand what solutions are already out there.

  • You should each find a research paper, newspaper article blog post, website, or app relevant to your goal.
  • Reflect on what you found
    • What is it about / does it do?
    • Why is it relevant to your project idea?
    • What did you learn by reading/trying it?
  • Then write a paragraph of at least 200 words summarizing what you found. (1 per individual)
  • You should also write a plain language version of the same paragraph (1 per individual)

Write A Paragraph About Your Proposal (Group)

Your write up should include the following information

  • Describe the general need (including who the user is, what activity they are doing, what environment they are in, what their goal/need is)
  • What First Person Account are you drawing from?
  • What are you proposing to do

Assessment & Handin Process

Make a post on Ed containing

  • Name your group members
  • Your initial abstract

Also hand in your competencies (use your individually-written background research paragraph for your first person account)

Finding First Person Accounts (rubric)

  • A link to the first person account
  • A reflection answering the following questions
    • What first person account did you find and does it meet the requirements for a first person account described above
    • What are the barriers and opportunities the person described?
    • What technology did they describe using?
    • How might what you learned extend beyond this specific person, disability and/or technology?
    • A list of additional resources you used to answer these questions (first person accounts, research papers, etc). If you use Generative AI, you still need to check and cite relevant references.

Plain Language (rubric)

  • Original text (unsimplified), minimum of 200 words
  • Simplified text
  • A list of the guidelines you wish to be assessed on, and an example of something you changed to meet each of them. You need at least five to be assessed as "excellent"

Back to top

The University of Washington acknowledges the Coast Salish peoples of this land, the land which touches the shared waters of all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations. This site is maintained by J. Mankoff.