[Access Lunch] Fwd: [MSR Thesis Talk] Towards Automating Accessibility in Digital Authoring Workflows

[Aaron Steinfeld]

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Peya Mowar <pmowar at andrew.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, Jul 7, 2025 at 9:46 AM
Subject: [MSR Thesis Talk] Towards Automating Accessibility in Digital
Authoring Workflows
To: RI People <ri-people at andrew.cmu.edu>


Hello everyone,
I will be giving my MSR thesis talk on Monday, July 14, 2025 at 12:30 PM
EDT in GHC 4405.
Everyone is invited!

*Date*: Monday, July 14th, 2025
*Time*: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM EDT
*Location*: Gates and Hillman Center (GHC) 4405
*Zoom Link*:
https://cmu.zoom.us/j/96220059411?pwd=tLkMb3riHbalo9vwWGVKIZG0A6mnMa.1

*Title*: Towards Automating Accessibility in Digital Authoring Workflows

*Abstract*:
Most digital content today remains inaccessible to people with
disabilities, who make up 16% of the global population. A long-standing
challenge in accessible computing is ensuring digital authors consistently
provide the metadata required to make their content accessible through
assistive technologies. Despite numerous specialized accessibility tools,
authors often lack the time, training, or incentive to use them effectively.

Recent advancements in AI bring an unprecedented opportunity for automating
the production and preservation of accessibility metadata in the authoring
process. This thesis argues that developers and content creators can use AI
tools to make their digital content accessible with minimal disruption to
their existing workflows. It presents two novel AI authoring tools aimed at
improving the digital accessibility of websites and scientific documents.

The first, CodeA11y, is an AI coding assistant that helps front-end
developers produce accessibility-compliant user interface code. The second,
WYISWYM tagging, preserves semantic metadata already present in authored
source documents to generate tags and preserve reading order in PDFs.
Through comprehensive evaluations, this thesis demonstrates the
effectiveness of these tools and represents a first step toward automating
accessibility in mainstream digital authoring workflows.

*Committee*:
Prof. Jeffrey P. Bigham (advisor)
Prof. Aaron Steinfeld (advisor)
Prof. Deva Ramanan
Vivian Shen

--
Peya Mowar
MSR Student, Robotics Institute - CMU
cs.cmu.edu/~peyajm29
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.andrew.cmu.edu/pipermail/accessibility-lunch/attachments/20250710/aff507a2/attachment.html>