The Accessibility Lab was founded in 2022 by Professor Dhruv Jain and his students. Our long-term vision is to make the world accesssible for everyone, everywhere. We believe in this vision because accessibilty affects everyone, not just people with disabilities. All of us find conversations difficult to hear in noisy bars, doorbells inaudible over a vacuum cleaner running, or may miss a phone ringing on a train. In future, we believe that every information and technology will be accessible by default.
Our current focus is on "sound". We are studying systems that deliver sound information in alternative ways—using visual or haptic feedback or through enhanced audio. A key aspect of our research is the focus on the user—we follow a thorough design process to understand our users' concerns, build technology systems to address those concerns, and deploy and study our systems with the users in their natural environments. We publish research work in the most prestigious human-computer interaction venues such as CHI, UIST, and ASSETS; seven of our past publications have been honored with awards. We also especially care about deployment: our systems have been publicly launched (e.g., one has over 100,000 users) and have received attention from industries such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple.
Nov 18: Hriday Chhabria joined our team. Welcome Hriday! Nov 1: Jeremy Huang joined our team. Welcome Jeremy! May 26: SoundWatch featured in CACM Research Highlights! Jan 21: Our paper on Non Verbal Sound Detection for Disordered Speech was accepted to ICASSP 2022! Nov 19: Our paper on a personalizable sound recognition system was accepted to CHI 2022!
Prospective PhD students: We are hiring PhD students for Fall 2023 with the following set of skills: (1) those with prior HCI and user study experience to lead projects focused on Deaf/disabled population, or (2) those with prior applied ML experience around sound and audio, but who also can build HCI systems and run independent HCI focused projects (through conducting user studies, collecting data, and evaluating end-to-end systems). If you think you fit any of these skills, please send DJ an email at profdj [at] umich [dot] edu with a brief justification of your skill set (e.g., through relevant research experience), a list of projects in the lab that you are interested in, and your CV.
Undergraduates/Masters students: Please complete this form and we will reach out to you!
Postdocs: Please send DJ an email with your justification for a post-doc position, your dissertation draft, and your CV.