The products of an 18-month-long collaboration between my lab and Google designers and researchers is finally seeing the light of day! With a forthcoming ASSETS research article, and now a blog post on Material Design, we are delighted to share our co-developed inclusive design imagery. What sets this collection apart is that it depicts (often excluded) people with disabilities and other marginalized identities, and all images come with carefully crafted alt text / image descriptions. So, they are actually accessible to people with various disabilities.
We are excited, also, to share that these images will not only be used internally by Google designers to imagine more inclusive technologies. They will also be shipped on all new Google Chromebooks as accessible, inclusive avatar options at system setup.
Many thanks are owed to my advisee, PhD candidate Emory Edwards, for leading the team here at UCI. Thanks are also owed to Emily Blank and Michael Gilbert, our collaborators at Google. And, of course, we are deeply thankful to the many people with disabilities who shared their feedback to refine these images and craft alt text.