Dhruv Jain named ACM SIGCHI VP for Accessibility

Dhruv Jain, assistant professor in CSE, has been named the VP for Accessibility for the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. In this role, he will oversee the group’s efforts to make its conferences and publications more accessible to people with a variety of sensory, motor, or language barriers and other disabilities.

“SIGCHI has a longstanding history of diversity and inclusion efforts. I am honored to serve in this position and look forward to collaborating with an esteemed group of people to continue to strengthen accessibility across a wide variety of HCI conferences.” said Jain.

Jain has served as Accessibility Co-Chair of three HCI conferences, where he was instrumental in improving visual accessibility of media and print materials as well as setting up open-captioning for deaf and hard of hearing people. In his new role as VP for Accessibility, he aims to continue SIGCHI’s efforts in improving the pipeline to generate accessible PDFs for conference papers and presentations, as well as introduce new efforts to improve audio accessibility of posters and ease access to accommodation services for hybrid conferences.

Jain’s research is in accessibility, and investigates HCI and AI methods to build deployable accessible systems. He completed his PhD from University of Washington, masters from MIT Media Lab, and has worked at Google, Apple, and Microsoft Research. His dissertation on sound accessibility and awareness systems recently earned the SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award and the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award, and his past work on accessibility technologies have earned best paper awards and honorable mentions.