The Vicki Hanson Story!

Employing the Disabled Is a Great Idea! Celebrating Disability Employment Awareness Month!

Job: IBM SIGCHI

Accessibility research manager Vicki Hanson says her SIGCHI 2008 Social Impact Award came out of the Blue, and she's right on two counts. It was a complete surprise to her, and it evolved, at least in part, out of her extensive work with IBM.

Hanson, who received the award during a recent ceremony in Florence, Italy, says the awards committee of the Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction made the decision without her knowledge, singling her out for nearly 30 years of work involving persons with disabilities. SIGCHI is part of the Association for Computing Machinery and provides an international forum for the exchange of ideas about the way people work with computers.

The citation "came completely out of the blue," she acknowledges, though SIGCHI probably would argue happily that Hanson's reputation for decades of work in the area of human–computer interaction (HCI) is out there for all to see. Award recipients are selected based on a body of professional work that results in the application of HCI research to pressing social needs.

Hanson joined the IBM Research Division in 1986, and before that conducted research in American Sign Language, first as a post–doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Language and Cognition at the Salk Institute, and then as a research associate with the Reading Research Group at Haskins Laboratories. Currently she manages the Accessibility Research group at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. Along the way she has earned multiple technical achievement and professional awards, as well as spots on advisory boards for universities and non–profit organizations focused on the area of disabilities.

The gap trapIn accepting the Social Impact Award, Hanson told SIGCHI members there are gaps in technologies for people with disabilities. "Technology can be a great leveler of the playing field," she advises, "but as technologies continue to evolve, developers need to keep in mind the needs of people with disabilities."

"In the workforce," she adds, "we're not sufficiently taking advantage of the abilities of people who could contribute if they had the right tools." And by extension, inaccessible commercial enterprises aren't capitalizing on the very real buying power of people with disabilities.

For the near future, her work most likely will be directed at maturing populations, Hanson says. "Generally speaking, technology can be a barrier for older adults. We need to figure out how we can come up with the accessibility technology and tools to help them stay on the job."

Given her career–long focus on human–computer interaction, that aspiration shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.