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:

  1. Complex sites are difficult and inefficient to navigate using the serial interface exposed by screen readers.
  2. The content in images, animations and movies aren't accessible.
  3. Many sites can't be accessed at all because they're protected by a visual CAPTCHA.
  4. Functionality like dynamic menus or Flash content requiring the mouse is unavailable.
  5. 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:

Past Events