Richard Ladner showed me a link to the September 2014 SIGACCESS newsletter, which contains a personal essay on why he made a career transition from being a computer science theorist to an accessibility researcher. (Frequent readers of my blog will know that I met Richard Ladner as part of the Summer Academy.) As usual, I’m a bit late with posting news here on this blog — this one is a few months old — but here it is and hopefully you enjoy his essay. Some highlights:

  1. Richard: “Although I am not disabled, disability is in my fabric as one of four children of deaf parents. Both my parents were highly educated and were teachers at the California School for the Deaf, then in Berkeley, California. They both used American Sign Language (ASL) and speech for communication, although not simultaneously.”
  2. Richard: “When I started at the University of Washington in 1971 I had no intention of doing anything in the area of technology for people with disabilities. I worked exclusively in theoretical science where I had some modest success. Nonetheless, some where in the back of my mind the transformative nature of the TTY helped me realize the power of technology to improve people’s lives.”
  3. Richard: “A light bulb went off in my head when I realized that innovation in technology benefits greatly when people with disabilities are involved in the research, not just as testers, but as an integral part of the design and development team.”
  4. Richard: “In 2002, with the arrival of Sangyun Hahn, a new graduate student from Korea who happens to be blind, I began my transition from theoretical computer scientist to accessibility researcher. By 2008 the transition was complete.”
  5. Richard: “One activity that I am particularly proud of is the Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing that I developed with the help of Robert Roth who is deaf. […] Eighty-three students completed the program over its 7-year run from 2007-13. About half of these students became computer science or information technology majors.”
  6. Richard: “For students who want to become accessibility researchers I also have one piece of advice. Get involved at a personal level with people with disabilities. With this direct knowledge you are more likely to create a solution to an accessibility problem that will be adopted, not one that will sit on the shelf in some journal or conference proceedings.”

On a related note, Richard isn’t the only scientist who has made a late-stage research transition. I personally know several scientists/professors (though none as well as Richard) who have substantially changed their research agenda. One interesting trend is that people who do make transitions tend to move towards more applied research. It’s almost never the other way around, and I suspect that it’s due to a combination of two factors. First, theory-oriented research requires a lot of mathematical background to make progress, which can be a deterring factor. And second, I think many theorists wish their work could have more of a real world impact.