A screenshot of my SIGCHI Societal Impact Award talk title slide with mountains in the background and a big, bold yellow title stating "You don't do HCI" - Stories of Persistence, Pushback, & Pursuit. After the title is my name and affiliation followed by lab logos and UW

Attending CHI'26 in Barcelona? Come to my SIGCHI Societal Impact Award talk entitled "'You Don't Do HCI' — Stories of Persistence, Pushback, & Pursuit" on Tues, Apr 14 at 4:30PM in the Auditorium.

GeoVisA11y GeoVisA11y is an LLM-based question-answering system that makes geovisualizations accessible through natural language interaction.

Congratulations to @chimichurrichu.bsky.social on their CHI'26 Best Paper for GeoVisA11y: makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/project/geov...

Happy Valentine's Day from the Makeability Lab. Sending 💕during this time of tumultuousness. Take care of yourself and those around you.

Jon E. Froehlich Professor Froehlich’s academic webpage.

I am recruiting new PhD students this year in:

🌆 Urban Computing / GeoAI
🥽 Augmented Reality
🎨 Creativity Support Tools

Why join us? Work on state-of-the-art Human-AI research that has real-world impact at one of the top CS programs in the world.

Deadline: Dec 15
See: jonfroehlich.github.io

The two-stage RampNet banner

We're launching RampNet, an open-source AI that helps detect curb ramps with near-human accuracy.

The most amazing part? The entire project was conceived of and led by high school student John O'Meara.

🧵 A thread on what we built and why it matters.

Trump Administration Live Updates: U.S. Suspends Visa Interviews for Foreign Students

This saddens me deeply. I have greatly benefited from working w/extraordinary international students; they have brought me & my lab incredible energy, ideas, & helped create some of the most gratifying & important breakthroughs in my career. They are in fear. Not OK! www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05...

Vision Foundation Models and Generative AI for Accessibility Workshop CV4A11y, ICCV 2025 Workshop

📢 We are delighted to announce our ICCV 2025 workshop on "Vision Foundation Models and Generative AI for Accessibility: Challenges & Opportunities"!

Two submission tracks: extended abstracts and full papers—the latter published in the ICCV workshop proceedings.

cv4a11y.github.io/ICCV2025/ind...

Accessibility for Whom? We present a large-scale online survey exploring how five mobility groups—users of canes, walkers, mobility scooters, manual wheelchairs, and motorized wheelchairs—perceive sidewalk barriers and diffe...

One map fits all? 🤔 Unfortunately, no! Our #CHI2025 study reveals significant differences in how cane, walker, scooter & wheelchair users perceive sidewalk barriers. Dataset & paper: makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/project/acce... This is work led by the amazing @chimichurrichu.bsky.social

Addendum: sources tell me it's #CHI2025! 🤣😂

Also, first-year PhD student @jaredhwang.bsky.social will also be at CHI (first-time attendee). Please say hello 👋🏽. Jared is interested in AI applications to large-scale urban problems (bikeability, walkability, accessibility, climate-resilience).

Thumbnails of our four papers at CHI with logos from CHI, the Makeability Lab, DUB, and the Allen School

#CHI2015 in Japan is here! The Makeability Lab has 3 full papers and 1 late-breaking work spanning research on urban accessibility & urban sensing, sound rec, & creative design tools using depth estimation. Congrats Chu, Daniel, & Xia! See: makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu/news/four-pa...

GitHub - ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage: Project Sidewalk web page Project Sidewalk web page. Contribute to ProjectSidewalk/SidewalkWebpage development by creating an account on GitHub.

Special shout out to Project Sidewalk's lead engineer, Mikey Saugstad @ismikey.bsky.social, who has contributed not just countless lines of code but has mentored dozens of MS, undergrad, & high schoolers. Huge impact! Our GitHub repo: 10k commits from 77 contributors. github.com/ProjectSidew...

Incredible milestone reached for one our lab's flagship projects. Huge thanks to the many partners and contributors: 100+ undergrads, multiple PhD students (spanning three generations!), dozens of high schoolers, and, of course, our NGOs & local community advocacy groups. Try it: projectsidewalk.org

Hello! 👋 We are an open-source research project run by the @makeabilitylab.bsky.social. We have a two-pronged vision: first, to develop scalable data collection methods for sidewalk accessibility data using crowdsourcing, computer vision, and online map imagery; and second,

Flyer soliciting research participants. It says: "Call for study participants. Criteria: 18 years or older, lives in the US, eligible to use disability parking. Study details: ~1 hour Zoom interview, $25 per hour compensation. Help us improve disability parking by sharing your experiences! Interested? Fill out this screening form tinyurl.com/uw-parking-screener. For questions, email jaredhwa@cs.uw.edu." At the bottom of the flyer are the logos for the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, styled as a large W with text to the side, and the Makeability Lab, styled as a large M with the text Makeability Lab underneath.

⚠️ We're recruiting participants for a research study! We'd like to understand how people use disability parking. Fill out this screener if you fit the criteria, and we may reach out to interview you.

🔗 tinyurl.com/uw-parking-screener
💸 $25/hr compensation

Makeability Lab Handbook Makeability Lab Handbook By Professor Jon Froehlich and lab membersAllen School of Computer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Washington Welcome to the Makeability Lab! 👋 We are so happfy that y...

What is $131,742? Answer: this is how much it costs me to fund a PhD student per year for a full RAship in CS at UW (including 100% during the summer). PhD funding can be a confusing topic at US universities. Want to learn more? Take a look at our lab handbook: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Love the influx of academics to Bluesky. Will this be our new 🏠? To help grow the community, I just created an HCI+Accessibility "starter pack". Help me grow the list! Many are missing! go.bsky.app/PZxHNqP

Makeability Lab Website The Makeability Lab is an advanced research lab in Human-Computer Interaction directed by Professor Jon E. Froehlich at University of Washington's Allen School of Computer Science.

Hello 👋🏽, we are a research lab in Human-AI directed by Professor @jonfroehlich.bsky.social at UW. We specialize in HCI & applied machine learning for high-impact problems in accessibility, computational urban science, and augmented reality. See makeabilitylab.cs.washington.edu

Makeability Lab - How to Videos How to Videos makeabilitylab.cs.uw.edu Thanks to Professor Liang He for recommending some examples

As we work on those #CHI2025 videos (deadline: Sept 19), here is a set of inspirational videos 🎥 curated by my lab. Would love more examples, especially for other HCI research contribution types. Send them my way!

docs.google.com/presentation...