[Massachusetts-NFB] Exciting paid opportunity for blind or low-vision students and adults 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 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/
.

The project is now in its second year, and we're continuing to look for for
science/math-oriented high-school, college students and adult professionals
in the greater Boston area to test the software we're developing.  I
wanted to alert you about this opportunity and ask if you could spread the
word to students and others 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/massachusetts-nfb_nfbnet.org/attachments/20260216/41ed85c4/attachment.htm>