In 2008, Information School Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock and his research team published a paper describing one of the first accessibility tools designed for the newly released touch-operated iPhone 1. 

Amid all the hype around the futuristic design, Wobbrock’s team identified a practical issue with the breakthrough smartphone. Many blind people rely on tactile controls, such as buttons and dials, to operate devices by feel. On desktop computers, for example, users could control screen readers with keyboard commands. On flip phones, raised buttons and notched dials could be used by blind people to operate the devices. But the new Apple product had a flat, smooth glass screen, creating an accessibility issue that left entire communities unable to use the new technology. 

Wobbrock’s life’s work has been dedicated to confronting such emerging accessibility gaps in technology and innovation. More than two decades after he began his journey researching human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, Wobbrock is being recognized with the SIGACCESS Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computing and Accessibility. This lifetime achievement award makes Wobbrock the 10th recipient in a line of highly accomplished scholars, including fellow UW professor and longtime collaborator Richard Ladner. 

“These are people I've looked up to and whose work I've really admired for many years,” Wobbrock said. “It’s quite a privilege to join their ranks.”

One project he remains particularly proud of was the finger-driven screen reader he and his team developed to address the early iPhone’s accessibility issue. 

In collaboration with then-Ph.D. students Shaun Kane and Jeffrey Bigham, Wobbrock built a prototype called Slide Rule. The team found a way to create their own apps on an iPhone (before there was an application-building toolkit) to test their touch-based screen reader, which read aloud what users touched, providing faster summaries when they moved their finger quickly and more detailed output when they slowed down. They also designed the prototype to enable certain gestures to safely select on-screen items, such as buttons and links, without users having to lift their fingers and lose their place. 

When the iPhone’s VoiceOver feature was released a few years later, Wobbrock’s colleague Richard Ladner received an email from an Apple engineer stating that Slide Rule had been influential in the design of Apple’s iOS screen reader. 

While working on Slide Rule, Wobbrock, Kane, and Bigham worked directly with blind people to develop technology that fits what they can do, rather than requiring them to adapt to the technology's assumptions. Wobbrock calls this approach “ability-based design.” 

“We're still in a world where people mostly have to solve their own access problems, and ability-based design tries to shift the burden onto the technology to meet a user's abilities,” he said. 

Wobbrock will give the opening keynote at the 2026 ASSETS conference, held in Porto, Portugal, from Oct. 25-28 and hosted by SIGACCESS, ACM’s Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing. He plans to deliver a speech titled “25 Years, 5 Projects, and 5 Reflections on Accessible Computing,” which will revisit five significant projects — EdgeWrite, Slide Rule, Pointing Magnifier, ability-based design, and the Epidemiology Model for large-scale mobile app accessibility. He’ll discuss the lessons those projects taught him and end with how he sees AI changing the future of access technology. 

“I'm framing it as if I were in the audience as my junior self in 2001, just starting out,” he said. “What would I have benefited from hearing from my future, more experienced self?”

Through his work, Wobbrock has sometimes noticed tension between pursuing rigorous research and non-research activism and advocacy, both of which he deems important. He hopes his experiences will show other academics and researchers that rather than choosing one or the other, rigorous research can directly produce real-world impact and support activism and advocacy.

The recognition also gives Wobbrock an opportunity to reflect on his accomplishments, for which he expressed the most gratitude to the students he’s mentored along the way. 

“More than any of the projects, I certainly am most proud of the students I’ve had the privilege of working with,” he said. “So many of them have gone on to really influential careers of their own.”

As he looks to the future, Wobbrock aims to understand how AI can advance human-computer interaction and ability-based design. He described how, while AI can promise faster, more customized experiences by learning users’ preferences and behaviors, it can also place an obligation on users to provide additional data to receive the best experience. He wants to avoid a future in which people with disabilities have to sacrifice their personal privacy in order to reap the full benefits of AI.

“I think a good part of my research agenda over the next 20 years will be to find ways that AI can really support accessibility but avoid the harmful pitfalls that I think are looming.”