Maitraye Das earns Google research award for designing tech for blind and low-vision people

Author: Madelaine Millar 
Date: 08.21.24

Maitraye Das (left) points at a computer screen while two other researchers look at the screen.
Photos by Ian MacLellan.

Imagine listening to someone read out a jumble of sticky notes strewn across a digital whiteboard.

“Should probably include Brad and Julie too. Blue sticky note.”

“Re: collaboration with external stakeholders. Green sticky note.”

“Can we get a timeline on this? Red sticky note.”

“What are the approvals for that process? Green sticky note.”

“See my earlier note. Blue sticky note.”

a screenshot of a Miro board that shows a System Design and Evaluation diagram

If you could see the notes themselves — their colors, their arrangement, the arrows drawn between them — the larger picture would become clear. But for blind and low-vision people who rely on screen readers, digital whiteboards can be frustratingly inaccessible word salads. Retrofitting software to be compatible with screen readers is a start, but genuinely enriching experiences for disabled users requires consideration from the design stage.

Maitraye Das

And that’s exactly what Maitraye Das is doing.

Das is an assistant professor jointly appointed in Khoury College and the College of Arts, Media and Design. She is also the director of the Technology, Equity, and Accessibility (TEA) Lab, and one of seven recipients of Google’s 2024 Research Scholar Award in Human-Computer Interaction. The award provides $60,000 over the coming year to conduct research in an area of interest to Google — in this case, developing a digital whiteboard that uses nonvisual interaction like sonification and nonspeech audio, as well as generative AI, to promote accessibility for blind and low-vision users.

“When we create new technological experiences, we don’t always think about people who have disabilities. What that means is we are creating technologies that will provide an inequitable experience, that will cause barriers to access,” Das said. ”It’s really important to think about not only innovation, but innovations that are accessible to all.”

In the context of digital tools like online whiteboards, a lack of accessibility can confuse and overwhelm users with disabilities, as well as inhibit their careers and earning potential. So for Das, the first step of designing a better solution was interviewing people with disabilities about their experiences using digital whiteboards. The process yielded interesting findings — for instance, that organizing a brainstorm session using color-coded digital sticky notes was overwhelming and difficult to track with accessibility technologies like screen readers.

During the design phase, Das will need to solve for access conflict, when making something accessible for one person makes it inaccessible for another. For example, the same color-coded digital sticky notes that trouble blind users are helpful for hard-of-hearing users. As a result, Das must design for flexibility, allowing users and teams to tailor the tool to their accessibility needs.

READ: Megan Hofmann wins SIGCHI award for disability-device dissertation

“When we think about designing a technology, it’s not only going to be used by nondisabled people, or only people with blindness or low vision, or only people who are hard of hearing,” Das said. “We want that to be usable and accessible for people in many different groups. We need to think about how we can enable multiple means of interaction with the technology, and how one form of interaction is not really diminishing or limiting other people’s participation.”

Maitraye Das writes on a whiteboard with a marker. There are several yellow, orange, and pink Post-it notes attached to the whiteboard.

The Google award was announced in April, so the exact output of Das’s design process remains to be seen. It could be a finished, usable piece of tech like Co11ab, her lab’s browser extension that makes real-time collaboration accessible for blind and low-vision users on Google Docs, or Simphony, her audio-enhanced pattern design tool for blind weavers. More likely, her work will contribute to a broader conversation about accessibility in design, the way the insights from her Co11ab research could be applied to the design of other collaborative tools.

But even if Das designs the world’s most disability-friendly digital whiteboard, the tech alone can’t solve what is fundamentally a social problem. Genuinely enriching digital experiences for disabled people requires changing how we think about accessibility on a larger scale. In this case, able-bodied users would need to think about their disabled colleagues’ needs and abilities when decided which tools to use and how to use them.

“We need to think about how we can support people with all these different needs — how we can enable different ways of interacting with a tool, of expressing and communicating and collaborating with each other,” Das said. “That makes it more challenging, but also more interesting to work on.”

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