Emma McDonnell is a final-year PhD candidate in Human Centered Design and Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on how accessible communication tools could be designed to better share access labor with hearing and nondisabled conversation partners, motivated by disability justice values of collective access and interdependence.
Kelly Avery Mack is a final year PhD Candidate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. Their work focuses on increasing representation of disability in digital technologies (e.g., avatars, AI systems) and broadening who is represented in accessibility research (e.g., people who are chronically ill, have mental health conditions, or are neurodiverse).
Kathrin Gerling is a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Accessibility at KIT, Germany, and a neurodivergent person. Her work aims to explore how disabled people leverage technology in the context of work and leisure, and she is interested in how accessible emerging technologies can contribute to our wellbeing.
Katta Spiel is an Assistant Professor of Critical Access in Embodied Computing at the HCI Group of TU Wien, where they work on the intersection of Computer Science, Design and Cultural Studies. They research marginalized perspectives on technologies to inform interaction design and engineering in critical ways, so they may account for the diverse realities they operate in and in collaboration with neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers.
Cynthia (Cindy) Bennett is a senior research scientist in Google’s Responsible AI organization. Her research concerns making technology-mediated experiences, such as those leveraging generative AI, accessible to and representative of people with disabilities while mitigating harmful applications. She is also a disabled woman scholar committed to raising participation of people with disabilities in computing fields.
Robin N. Brewer is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She studies the role of power in care relationships and care technologies with older adults and designs tools for non-visual technology access with older adults and people with disabilities.
Rua M. Williams is an Assistant Professor of User Experience Design at Purdue University. They are a Just Tech Fellow with the Social Science Research Council. Their research centers disabled ontology and epistemology in the analysis and critique of existing sociotechnical inequities and the design and development of new resistant sociotechnical formations.
Garreth W. Tigwell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His research primarily focuses on improving the accessibility of digital spaces by understanding challenges that designers face and how to support them in utilizing accessible design.