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Jacob O. Wobbrock ( [e-mail]) is a professor of human-computer interaction in the Information School and, by courtesy, in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, WA. USA.

Krzysztof Z. Gajos ( [e-mail]) is a Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. Shaun K. Kane ( [e-mail]) is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and, by courtesy, in the Department of Information Science, at the University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA.

Gregg C. Vanderheiden ( [e-mail]) is a professor and Director of the Trace R&D Center in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA, and Co-Director of the Global Public Inclusive Infrastructure.

© 2018 ACM 0001-0782/18/6

for each individual user. We thus see an important and continuing role for adaptivity and personalization within ability-based design.

We close with a quote from Frank
Bowe (1947–2007), professor and
disability-rights activist who helped
instigate the Americans with Disabili-
ties Act of 1990 ( https://www.ada.gov/).
Writing in MIT Technology Review in
1987, he emphasized the importance
of focusing on what people are able to
do, not on what holds people back: 1
“When society makes a commitment
to making new technologies accessi-
ble to everyone, the focus will no lon-
ger be on what people cannot do, but
rather on what skills and interests
they bring to their work. That will be
as it always should have been.”
We could not agree more.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our co-authors on the projects we covered here, especially Jeffrey Bigham, Leah Findlater, Jon Froehlich, Mayank Goel, Susumu Harada, Alex Mariakakis, Shwetak Patel, and Daniel S. Weld. This work was supported in part by the Mani Charitable Foundation and the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-0952786 and CNS-1539179. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of any supporter or collaborator.

 

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