Kristen Shinohara - Featured Faculty 2021

Dr. Shinohara's research in the areas of human computer interaction and accessibility encompasses the design of accessible technologies for people with disabilities, computing education, and supporting doctoral students with disabilities in STEM. Her research exploring how a college student uses assistive technologies was featured as the cover story for the Communications of the ACM, and her award winning work investigating the influence of social factors in accessible technology design and use led to the creation of the Design for Social Accessibility Method Cards. Her research interests include how to ensure technology is designed to be accessible, and how to make user centered design methods accessible for designers with disabilities.

Her NSF funded projects have focused on expanding access within and through computing education. Her collaboration with faculty at Creighton University and Western Washington University investigates how to incorporate accessibility into core CS courses, toward facilitating improved pedagogical and curricular tools for increasing accessibility knowledge and skills for next generation computing professionals. Her NSF funded project exploring the experiences of disabled graduate students has identified how inequitable and inadequate accommodation issues magnify access gaps that students encounter. This work informs how tools and services can be better leveraged toward student success. Dr. Shinohara is a faculty partner with AccessComputing, supporting students with disabilities in higher education, and with TeachAccess, an academic and industry consortium promoting teaching accessibility in computing curricula. She received her PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington and started at RIT in 2017.

Kristen Shinohara
Assistant Professor
School of Information
Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences