Shari Trewin

Developer of a keyboard configuration tool for individuals with motor impairments, Trewin is an HCI researcher at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, New York, whose long-standing research focus has been in supporting technology users with physical, sensory, or cognitive impairments. She has worked with people with disabilities since 1989. Her Ph.D. research at the University of Edinburgh was focused on keyboard and mouse use by people with motor impairments.

She began working at IBM Research in 2000 and continued her accessibility research, where she developed a tool for keyboard configuration that individuals and occupational therapists could download for free. As part of the Accessibility Research Group, Trewin looked at accessibility in virtual worlds (PowerUp), Web browsing (Web Adaptation Technology and accessibilityWorks), physical control of technology (Steady Clicks, Keyboard Optimizer and Dynamic Keyboard), preferences, and personalization. She collaborated with researchers at the University of Dundee, Scotland, and the University of Miami in an examination of the technology requirements of older workers, making the Web more accessible for them.

She contributed accessibility features to an IBM virtual worlds game that made it possible for people with visual, physical, and reading impairments to play the game with their peers. Her work has been used by non-profit organizations all over the world and has had an impact on people's ability to use the Web. Trewin subsequently joined the Software Productivity Group, where she has sought to blend her interests in users with her background in artificial intelligence and parallel programming into something useful, focusing on tools to help designers and developers build usability into their software.

Among the numerous publications she authored or co-authored, her most recent were: "Extending Predictive Models of Exploratory Behavior to Broader Populations", with J. Richards, R. Bellamy, B. John, and C. Swart, D. Sloan, Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Design for All and eInclusion, Springer, 2011; "Self-selection of accessibility options", with N. Santhanam, C. Swart, and P. Santhanam, The proceedings of the 13th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, 2011; "Dynamic accessibility: accommodating differences in ability and situation", with A. Hurst, K. Gajos, L. Findlater, J. Wobbrock, and A. Sears, Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems; and "Planning an accessible conference", ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing, ACM, 2011.