[Massachusetts-NFB] Exciting paid opportunity for blind or low-vision students to test new AI software to analyze data

[Geoff Freed]

Hello, everyone:

My name is Geoff Freed, and I'm an accessibility specialist; the former
Director of Digital Accessibility Consulting at Perkins Access, a division
of Perkins School for the Blind; as well as a former researcher and
director at the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM).

I'm writing to tell you about a three-year, NSF-funded project called Data
by Voice (https://concord.org/our-work/research-projects/data-by-voice/) on
which I'm the co-PI in conjunction with the Concord Consortium, based on
Concord, MA.  The basic premise of the project is to develop an AI-powered
agent called DAVAI (Data Analysis through Voice and Artificial
Intelligence), which will be embedded as a plugin in a graphing tool
called Common
online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) <https://codap.concord.org/>. DAVAI
will provide the interface between the user, the generative AI model, and
CODAP. It will interpret blind/low-vision users’ verbal and typed commands
to perform data transformations, generate data representations, facilitate
non-sequential navigation and exploration of data representations, and
provide text and sonified descriptions of data representations.  We
recently published a blog about the first year of the project at
https://concord.org/blog/making-data-exploration-accessible-for-blind-and-low-vision-learners-using-ai/
 .

We're looking for science/math-oriented high-school and college students in
the greater Boston area to test the software we're developing, so I wanted
to alert you about this opportunity and ask if you could spread the word to
students who might be interested in participating in a user-testing
session.  We're offering a $75 Amazon gift card in exchange for a 90-minute
testing session; more details are at http://short.concord.org/m4p .  If you
could pass this notice on to any interested students, I'd greatly
appreciate it!  Please let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks.
Geoff Freed
Director, onfocusAccess Consulting
geoff.freed at onfocusaccess.org
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