Portable air cleaners can provide additional protection against the spread of COVID-19 in small businesses, but it’s difficult for business owners to determine if an air cleaner will effectively ventilate their space. PACC is a web application based on research from air quality experts at Harvard University and University of Colorado Boulder that helps users find affordable and effective air cleaners. Sponsored by the Washington State Department of Commerce, our application lessens the burden on small businesses by providing a user-friendly website with a simplistic design. Our tool helps businesses operate safely and protects the health of employees and customers.

Interest in Portuguese Studies is growing, as evidenced by a new Minor in Portuguese Language and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Washington. Previously, Portuguese was only taught to the 200-level course. Now, students are researching in Portuguese and can access a collection with 300 items published in Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, and two LibGuides with digital collections and repositories from Lusophone countries. This project aimed to improve the Portuguese studies collections, teaching, and research support services to meet students' information needs.

With more than 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide, we believe that accessibility is essential and should not be left as an afterthought. Data visualizations are one area where accessibility lags behind. This is especially important for Power BI, a growing platform with over 5 million subscribers. Power BI creators have difficulties building accessible reports due to a lack of accessibility tools & standard guidelines on how to make visualizations accessible. Thus, we developed PowBility: a chrome extension that enables Power BI report creators to design accessible visualizations. PowBility aims to enable everyone to utilize visualizations to their full potential.

Epic’s Unreal Engine is complex with a lot of documentation and courses. The content creators face difficulty finding the information they are looking for and thus, require dynamically recommended related documentation/courses based on the Unreal Online Learning (UOL) search. We built a predictive analytics tool to recommend similar documentation and courses based on the UOL journey map of the user, working with terms from the taxonomies and knowledge graph. Our project helps users from different backgrounds to identify documentation easily, enabling equitable access to the tool. It also provides a personalized search experience for the user.

The International Medicine Clinic at Harborview Medical Center (Seattle, WA) is host to about 10,000 patients a year. Its most remarkable quality is that the vast majority of their patients speak a primary language other than English. Our project is aimed at facilitating the viral infection screening experience for patients, in their native language. We built an application with visual and auditory cues in seven different languages, in addition to creating educational materials in an accessible format for the patients. Our work will ensure equitable access to healthcare for patients that are typically aged 60-80 and have low technical dexterity.

A significant challenge for people with disabilities is the lack of awareness around accessible employers, programs, and opportunities within the community. Additionally, the information they seek on inclusive hiring practices, benefits, accommodations, and company culture is scattered across multiple sources. Our application uses data mining techniques on company blogs, Twitter, Glassdoor, YouTube, etc., to aggregate such information, and, in doing so, empowers the underserved disabled community to make more informed job-search decisions. The application also aims to help employers identify gaps in the information they provide, thus bringing them closer to diverse candidates' needs.

With 35,500 species being threatened with extinction around the world, the endangered species crisis is becoming severer each day. By educating high school and college students, they can be the leaders of change needed to protect our ecosystems. Project Perception is a website designed to push these students to learn more about endangered species by engaging in interactive stories that focus on overlooked species in different regions. With this project, we strive to help people realize the urgency of species decline and make sustainable lifestyle changes to positively impact our ecosystems.

A soft skill gap is growing between college grads and future employers, disproportionately affecting first-generation college students. We aim to close this gap by providing two workshops student organizations can use targeting key areas in supporting the growth of student's soft skills. Each workshop can be completed individually or through a cohort and includes pre- and post-lesson exercises, written instructions to complete the lesson, a slide deck, and more.

Schools have access to databases through public libraries, but students and teachers utilize few of them. Our project raised awareness of two databases that third grade dual language teachers and students were not already using: World Book Online Kids and Britannica Library Children. Our curriculum map showed teachers which features and articles align with their science curriculum and standards, while a video compared and contrasted the two, making it easier for teachers to add these resources into corresponding lessons. A video tutorial for students showed them how to access Britannica so they could use it independently.

The pandemic affected almost every part of our lives, especially social services that were delivered in person. We conducted a longitudinal research study interviewing 20 Washington State public librarians during the pandemic and tracked how their programming shifted throughout the year. We found three main themes that surfaced in our data – job satisfaction, changes to programming, and rethinking the profession once the world is "back to normal." We plan to ultimately disseminate our findings in a published paper to help librarians learn successful programming options to meet the needs of their communities.