Scholar Success Stories: A Former Student Explores Accessibility
The topic of digital accessibility–or the practice of designing, developing, and optimizing digital resources like websites, social media, and e-documents so that people with disabilities can effectively access them–has gained significant traction in the past decade.
Have you ever thought about the experience a quadriplegic has when trying to navigate online banking without using a mouse? How difficult must it be to view an important bar graph or pie chart if you’re color blind? Those who work in accessibility must address these concerns when helping companies optimize their digital presence for their users.
This type of work requires innate technological knowledge and at least an intermediate understanding of various software. We’re happy to say one of our star scholars, Student T, used her rich background in computer science and cloud-based machine learning to further the field of accessibility through artificial intelligence. Her time spent in a Scholar Launch research program was a resounding success.
Making the World More Accessible
By the time Student T joined one of our research cohorts, she’d already generated an impressive academic and extracurricular record. Her deep interest in computer science–which she nurtured inside and outside the classroom–led her to familiarize herself with various coding languages, including Python, Java, PHP, and Matlab. She then transmuted this knowledge by creating software that helped her peers gain access to scholarly papers.
Student T also co-founded a programming club at her high school to help school administrators curate an online system for their annual commerce contest. Additionally, she started another club to offer weekly lectures about algorithms commonly used in biology.
If that wasn’t enough, this ambitious student also liked to self-publish articles on the popular Chinese social app WeChat in her free time. However, she found the process of designing imagery for each article time-consuming and wanted to create software that generates images from text using artificial intelligence and allows users to choose a specific style (flat or artistic) for each image. Thus, the topic for her research was born.
Guided by the leadership of her Faculty Advisor–a Clinical Associate Professor from New York University’s Courant Institute–and Teaching Assistant–a PhD candidate from Columbia University–Student T learned to tailor her project and focus primarily on how this new software could assist blind people with producing art of their own. By showing her the benefits of targeting a social cause like accessibility, her mentors guided her in expanding her research project’s impact.
Student T went on to document the steps users will need to follow to use the new software on GitHub. She also wrote a 3,500-word paper on her research results and submitted it to multiple journals and data science trade magazines, producing a healthy submission record–evidence of hard work and dedication–to show off in her college applications.
She also earned a letter of recommendation from her Faculty Advisor and eventually gained acceptance letters from the University of California Irvine and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Student T enrolled in our program to collaborate on advanced research with a top university professor whose academic expertise could help inform the direction of her project. After incorporating her Faculty Advisor’s savvy recommendation to lean into empathy and social influence by using her software as an accessibility tool, she enhanced her college admission results and demonstrated intellectual creativity.
Student T’s success is a sign not only of her own academic fortitude, which she showcased before even joining Scholar Launch, but also of our faculty’s priceless guidance and mentorship. Together, we’re creating more success stories like this one every day.