The biennial CRA Conference was held at the Snowbird Resort in Utah from July 23 - 25, 2024. The lead plenary speaker was Haben Girma, the first DeafBlind person to graduate from Harvard Law School and a human rights lawyer advancing disability justice. She gave a wonderful talk about her own experiences with ableism and technology. Her talk was given orally, but she answered questions by having them translated to a refreshable Braille device in real-time. Since this was the leading plenary on the first day of the conference, the room was packed with perhaps three hundred leaders in computing fields from academia, industry, organizations, and government. One highlight of her presentation was a video that she showed of herself using a smartphone app that could detect when to cross a street by letting her know when the walk sign turned from red to green. The video showed that she received wrong information about where she was crossing the street because the two streets did not meet perpendicular to each other but at less than 90 degrees. The app was picking up the crossing sign from the wrong crossing. This demonstrates some of the perils of technology for disabled people, where something goes wrong because the technology meets a situation it was not programmed to anticipate. Readers interested in learning more about Haben Girma should go to her website.
On the final day, AccessComputing organized a 90-minute session titled: Disability and Accessibility in the Age of Generative AI. Ladner gave a short talk at the beginning about disability data. It was followed by a panel that was moderated by Kushalnagar and with panelists: Cecilia Aragon, faculty member from University of Washington; Dhruv Jain, faculty member from the University of Michigan; and Cynthia Bennett, researcher from Google. The panel focused on three questions:
What were some of the things that helped you on your journey to being a successful computer scientist?
How did you navigate around barriers you encountered during your graduate school and professional career?
What advice would you give chairs and leaders about how to be more inclusive toward faculty and researchers who have disabilities?
Coming from their own personal experiences, the moderator and panelists were able to describe their journeys to success and some of the barriers they faced in doing so. The audience of computing leaders asked questions or added comments at the end of the panel part of the session.
Following the panel was a talk titled “Generative AI Impacts” by Kate Glazko, AccessComputing Team member and Ph.D. student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. In the talk she described two research projects that assess the ability of generative AI to answer questions well when disability is a factor. The first was about the ability of generative AI to evaluate resumes which some items in the resume are related to disability, such as winning a “disability scholarship.” She showed that generative AI used for the purpose of evaluating such resumes is discriminatory or ableist. For details see her jointly authored paper titled “Identifying and Improving Disability Bias in GPT-Based Resume Screening” that appeared in 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '24). The second was about whether generative AI can do anything well for disabled people such as image creation, summarization, data visualization, and code production. For example, generative AI code production was not able to produce accessible results even when asked to do. Naturally, some of this can improve with better generative AI, but the training data must contain enough correct “knowledge” of issues around disability and accessibility. For details see her jointly authored paper titled “An Autoethnographic Case Study of Generative Artificial Intelligence's Utility for Accessibility” that appeared in the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '23).
About 35 computing leaders attended the session. The session slides can be found on the resources tab for the CRA Conference. AccessComputing also had a table where attendees could pick up literature about its activities.