The UW hosted the AccessComputing Leadership Institute in Seattle in fall 2008. The event brought together more than twenty-five leaders from around the country to broaden participation in computing for people with disabilities. The goals of the institute were threefold:
Since February 2006, AccessComputing has contributed funds to support computing-related activities, training, and experiential learning opportunities nationwide. Individuals can seek funding to support:
The promotion of cross-campus collaboration to increase the number of students with learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) pursuing higher degrees and careers in computing fields was focus of this AccessComputing CBI.
The UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering's WebAnywhere project was a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration (MATC). As Vint Cerf presented the award at the Coalition for Networked Information fall meeting he stated:
Richard Ladner, UW Department of Computer Science & Engineering professor and AccessComputing Co-Director, was one of fifteen recipients of the 2008 Purpose Prize, an award for social innovators over sixty years of age. Ladner has shifted the focus of his research from computer science theory to developing better technologies for people with disabilities.
This past summer, Anna Cavender, Lindsay Yazzolino, and I led thirty blind youth ages eight to twelve in two different Computer Science Unplugged activities. The Computer Science Unplugged program introduces youth to computing concepts without the use of computers. One group of fifteen students learned about sorting in a hands-on activity using different algorithms, including insertion sort, selection sort, and bubble sort. They sorted themselves by first name, birthday, and length of cane using the different algorithms.
In the fall of 2008, Professor Harry Lang from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology delivered a lecture titled "The Genius of Community: Technology as Friend and Foe in the Lives of Deaf People" to an audience of 150 people at the UW. In his lecture, Lang traced the invention of the teletypewriter (TTY) to a small group of determined deaf people who wanted to access the telephone in the 1960s.
ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) is the world’s largest organization dedicated to the study of how humans interact with interactive technologies. Since 2011, the SIGCHI Executive Committee has been discussing ways to become more inclusive of researchers and practitioners with disabilities.