SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Digital inaccessibility: Blind and low-vision people have powerful technology but still face barriers to the digital world. Imagine that you have low vision and you’re completing an online job application using screen reader software. You get through half the form and then come to a question with drop-down options the screen reader cannot access because the online form doesn’t conform to accessibility standards. You’re stuck. You can’t submit the application, and your time has been wasted. Assistive technologies like screen readers go a long way toward closing the gap between people who are blind or have low vision and their sighted peers. But the technologies often hit roadblocks because the information they are designed to work with – documents, websites and software programs – don’t w...

CAPTCHAs: The struggle to tell real humans from fake. CAPTCHAs are those now ubiquitous challenges you encounter to prove that you’re a human and not a bot when you go to log in to many websites. Websites and mobile apps have long been attacked by bots on a massive scale. Those malicious bots are programmed to automatically consume a large amount of computing resources, post spam messages, collect data from websites and even register and perform user authentication. This state of affairs led to the introduction of CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. As a computer scientist, I see CAPTCHAs as an effective shield for websites to prevent automated attacks, enhance cybersecurity and improve user experience – at least in the...

Disability community has long wrestled with ‘helpful’ technologies – lessons for everyone in dealing with AI. You might have heard that artificial intelligence is going to revolutionize everything, save the world and give everyone superhuman powers. Alternatively, you might have heard that it will take your job, make you lazy and stupid, and make the world a cyberpunk dystopia. Consider another way to look at AI: as an assistive technology – something that helps you function. With that view, also consider a community of experts in giving and receiving assistance: the disability community. Many disabled people use technology extensively, both dedicated assistive technologies such as wheelchairs and general-use technologies such as smart home devices. Equally, many disabled people re...

Quantum computers are like kaleidoscopes − why unusual metaphors help illustrate science and technology. Quantum computing is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get. Quantum phenomena – the behavior of matter and energy at the atomic and subatomic levels – are not definite, one thing or another. They are opaque clouds of possibility or, more precisely, probabilities. When someone observes a quantum system, it loses its quantum-ness and “collapses” into a definite state. Quantum phenomena are mysterious and often counterintuitive. This makes quantum computing difficult to understand. People naturally reach for the familiar to attempt to explain the unfamiliar, and for quantum computing this usually means using traditional binary computing as a meta...