An Interdisciplinary HCI Research Group
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The AXLE Lab is an interdisciplinary research group within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. We develop technology solutions to support, enhance, understand, and celebrate Ability in its many forms. The research we conduct aims to improve the quality of human lives through the thoughtful application of technology and social interventions.
If you're interested in getting involved, get in touch!
The projects in the lab can generally be thought of as Accessibility + X, where X equals one or more of our project areas:
Our work is united by a focus on inclusive design, equitable access, and human experience across technologies. From everyday interactive systems and autonomous mobility to sports participation and immersive environments.
We are surrounded by devices. How can we make interactive and "smart" technologies work better together with us? Our work aims to explore this problem space by both creating novel interactive experiences and examining the complexities of interaction for people who represent the diversity of human ability.
Today, cities are rethinking their portfolio of mobility services so that they can create systems that are more accessible, sustainable, and equitable. These include providing a variety of options such as public transit, rideshare services, electric scooter- and bike-share programs, ground-based delivery robots, and autonomous vehicles. Our research objective is to develop and test methods for municipalities to do community-driven design and deployment of innovative, accessible, and integrated mobility services.
We are working to develop and understand technology supports for enabling full experiences in competitive activities and games. Our current projects involve reducing barriers to participation and enhancing the experience of capturing and using analytics to achieve excellence.
Broadly scoped, our projects in this area aim to improve the overall experience of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality applications. We are particularly interested in engaging the interaction challenges imposed by today's immersive interfaces.
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Kaitlyn Ng, Bin Zhu, and Patrick Carrington
OSCAR: Object Status and Contextual Awareness for Recipes to Support Non-Visual Cooking
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Extended Abstracts (CHI EA 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Kaitlyn Ng, Bin Zhu, and Patrick Carrington
Exploring Object Status Recognition for Recipe Progress Tracking in Non-Visual Cooking
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Akihiko Oharazawa, Chloe Qingyu Zhu, Misty Fan, Daisuke Sato, Chieko Asakawa, and Patrick Carrington
More than One Step at a Time: Designing Procedural Feedback for Non-Visual Makeup Routines
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Lotus Zhang, Zhuohao (Jerry) Zhang, Gina Clepper, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Patrick Carrington, Jacob O. Wobbrock, and Leah Findlater
VizXpress: Towards Expressive Visual Content by Blind Creators Through AI Support
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Lan Xiao, Maryam Bandukda, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Mark Colley, and Catherine Holloway
Understanding the Video Content Creation Journey of Creators with Sensory Impairment in Kenya
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Atieh Taheri, Misha Sra, Patrick Carrington, and Jeffrey P. Bigham
Designing Through Lived Experience: Reflections on Control, Embodiment, and Social Bias in Accessibility Research
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Zheng Ning, Leyang Li, Daniel Killough, JooYoung Seo, Patrick Carrington, Yapeng Tian, Yuhang Zhao, Franklin Mingzhe Li, and Toby Jia-Jun Li
AROMA: Mixed-Initiative AI Assistance for Non-Visual Cooking by Grounding Multimodal Information Between Reality and Videos
Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Md Shafiqul Islam, Yunzhi Li, Md Mahfuzur Rahman, Kenton Williams, Wendy Berry Mendes, and Jilong Kuang
BallistoBud: Heart Rate Variability Monitoring Using Earbud Accelerometry for Stress Assessment
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Sanika Moharana, Cynthia L. Bennett, Erin Buehler, Michael Madaio, Vinita Tibdewal, and Shaun K. Kane
“Accessibility People, You Go Work on That Thing of Yours over There”: Addressing Disability Inclusion in AI Product Organizations
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2025). ACM/AAAI. [doi] [PDF]
William Agnew, Julia Barnett, Annie Chu, Rachel Hong, Michael Feffer, Robin Netzorg, Harry H. Jiang, Ezra Awumey, and Sauvik Das
Sound Check: Auditing Recent Audio Dataset Practices
Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2025). ACM/AAAI. [doi] [PDF]
Weinan Wang, Li Zhu, Mehrab Bin Morshed, Md. Mahbubur Rahman, Jungmok Bae, and Jilong Kuang
Evaluation of Wearable Head BCG for PTT Measurement in Blood Pressure Intervention
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025). IEEE. [doi] [PDF]
Hao Zhou, Md. Mahbubur Rahman, Mehrab Bin Morshed, Yunzhi Li, Md. Saiful Islam, Larry Zhang, Jungmok Bae, Christina Rosa, Wendy Berry Mendes, and Jilong Kuang
Know Your Heart Better: Multimodal Cardiac Output Monitoring Using Earbuds
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025). IEEE. [doi] [PDF]
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Michael Xieyang Liu, Shaun K. Kane, and Patrick Carrington
A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in Cooking
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
JiWoong Jang, Sanika Moharana, Patrick Carrington, and Andrew Begel
“It’s the Only Thing I Can Trust”: Envisioning Large Language Model Use by Autistic Workers for Communication Assistance
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Noor Hammad, Frank Elavsky, Sanika Moharana, Jessie Chen, Seyoung Lee, Patrick Carrington, Dominik Moritz, Jessica Hammer, and Erik Harpstead
Exploring the Affordances of Game-Aware Streaming to Support Blind and Low Vision Viewers: A Design Probe Study
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Ashley Wang, Patrick Carrington, and Shaun K. Kane
A Recipe for Success? Exploring Strategies for Improving Non-Visual Access to Cooking Instructions
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Yunzhi Li, Vimal Mollyn, Kuang Yuan, and Patrick Carrington
WheelPoser: Sparse-IMU Based Body Pose Estimation for Wheelchair Users
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Nari Johnson, Sanika Moharana, Christina N. Harrington, Nazanin Andalibi, Hoda Heidari, and Motahhare Eslami
The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2024). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Yunzhi Li, Franklin Mingzhe Li, and Patrick Carrington
Breaking the “Inescapable” Cycle of Pain: Supporting Wheelchair Users’ Upper Extremity Health Awareness and Management with Tracking Technologies
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Siyou Pei, Alexander Chen, Chen Chen, Franklin Mingzhe Li, Megan Fozzard, Hao-Yun Chi, Nadir Weibel, Patrick Carrington, and Yang Zhang
Embodied Exploration: Facilitating Remote Accessibility Assessment for Wheelchair Users with Virtual Reality
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Franklin Mingzhe Li, Lotus Zhang, Maryam Bandukda, Abigale Stangl, Kristen Shinohara, Leah Findlater, and Patrick Carrington
Understanding Visual Arts Experiences of Blind People
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2023). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Frank Elavsky, Lucas Nadolskis, and Dominik Moritz
Data Navigator: An Accessibility-Centered Data Navigation Toolkit
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG 2023). IEEE. [doi] [PDF]
Jiachen Li, Bingrui Zong, Tingyu Cheng, Yunzhi Li, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, and Ashutosh Dhekne
Privacy vs. Awareness: Relieving the Tension Between Older Adults and Adult Children When Sharing In-Home Activity Data
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2023). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Christina N. Harrington, Aashaka Desai, Aaleyah Lewis, Sanika Moharana, Anne Spencer Ross, and Jennifer Mankoff
Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability, and Accessibility
Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2023). ACM. [doi] [PDF]
Sanika Moharana, Patrick Carrington, and Christina N. Harrington
Inclusive Design of CUIs Across the Intersection of Race and Disability
CHI 2023 Workshop. CUI@CHI: Inclusive Design of CUIs Across Modalities and Mobilities (CHI 2023). [PDF]
