Jeffrey P. Bigham

I'm entering my fifth year at the University of Washington. My work centers on improving access to web information and focuses on improving web accessibility for blind web users for whom web access is often inefficient and frustrating. I helped begin the WebInSight project with a system that automatically adds alternative text to web images. I'm currently pursuing three complementary projects: WebinSitu seeks a better understanding of the browsing behavior of blind web users, WebAnywhere enables web access for blind people from any computer that happens to be available, and Accessmonkey will allow users to improve accessibility without relying on web developers. It's just beginning, but be sure to check out my Web Accesssibility Blog.

In addition to web accessibility, I'm working to improve access to information for all web users by leveraging work from my days on the KnowItAll project and as an intern at Google. By combining ideas from end user programming, Transcendence enables users to explore the web hidden behind forms in ways not currently possible. Here's a sweet video of Transcendence in action, and here are the slides from my IUI Presentation about Transcendence.

Web Accessibility Research

The web represents a great opportunity for blind users because of the enormous amount of information made available in a format that can be converted to speech or braille, but web access remains difficult for blind users because:

Complex sites are difficult and inefficient to navigate using the serial interface exposed by screen readers.
The content in images, animations and movies aren't accessible.
Many sites can't be accessed at all because they're protected by a visual CAPTCHA.
Functionality like dynamic menus or Flash content requiring the mouse is unavailable.
Screen readers don't handle the fancy Web 2.0 web applications well, making them unusable.

Fun Videos

Monkey Cribs: By Craig Prince and Jeff Bigham created using C++.

Google Kirkland Tech Talk. My first talk on WebAnywhere.

Watch me (and others) explain why computer science is cool.

Dancing like crazy elves. Thanks to Becki and OfficeMax.

Transcendence Project Video. Narrated by Craig Prince.

Jeffrey P. Bigham, jbigham@cs.washington.edu, (206) 616-1843

Upcoming Events

Events I'm planning to attend:

W4A 2008, 4/21/2008 - 4/22/2008, and WWW 2008, 4/23/2008-4/26/2008, Beijing, China. The annual W4A Conference on Web Accessibility, held in conjunction with WWW.
VISION 2008, 7/7/2007 - 7/11/2007, Montreal, Canada. 9th International Conference on Low Vision.
ICWE 2008, 7/16/2008-7/18/2008, Yorktown Heights, New York. The annual ICWE Conference on Web Engineering. I'll be talking about how we were able to make WebAnywhere usable through clever engineering.

Past Events

ICWSM 2008, 3/31/2008 - 4/2/2008, Seattle, WA, USA. International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
SIGCSE 2008, 3/12/2008 - 3/15/2008, Portland, OR, USA. The Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.
CSUN 2008, 3/10/2008 - 3/14/2008, Los Angeles, CA, USA. Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference.
IUI 2008, 1/13/2008 - 1/16/2008, Canary Islands, Spain. The International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. I presented Transcendence: Enabling a Personal View of the Deep Web. (slides)
Stony Brook University, 11/05/2007 - 11/07/2007, Stony Brook, NY. Visited the Hearsay team, learned first-hand about the exciting projects that they are pursuing and gave a talk about several of the projects being pursued by the WebInSight team.
ASSETS 2007, 10/15/2007 - 10/18/2007, Tempe, AZ. The annual SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility. I participated in the doctoral consortium where I talked about Accessmonkey. (Accessmonkey PPT) Then I gave a talk about our study WebinSitu (WebinSitu PPT), and finally offered a demo of WebAnywhere. Overall, the conference was a great experience and I got a lot amazing feedback from people.
NFB Youth Slam, 7/28/2006 - 8/4/2006, John Hopkins, Baltimore. 15 blind high school students descended on John Hopkins and my team and I taught them all there is to know about computer science in 4 days. They created Instant Messager Chatbots inspired by a class project that I completed while an undergrad at Princeton. --UPDATE-- Our SIGCSE paper about this experience was accepted!!
Generals Completed!, April 6, 2007. I successfully passed my general exam. In it I proposed my future research and much of the direction of the WebInSight project. Check out my Generals Paper for more information about where I'm headed.