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jessejm [at] cs [dot] washington [dot] edu I am a sixth-year PhD Student at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. I will be on the academic job market in the 2025-26 cycle. I do research in Human-Computer Interaction with James Fogarty, focusing on Interactive Media Accessibility. I aim to make games more accessible through technology, and make the world more accessible through games. I completed my BS in 2019 at the University of Chicago, where I did research with Blase Ur and worked with Patrick Jagoda on the 2017 ARG, the parasite. I'm also a computational artist, transmedia game designer, puzzle creator, and tabletop & video gamer. Email / CV / Google Scholar |
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Publications & Presentations
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Current Projects
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Accessibility & Game Adoption ◆ Research
Project Advisors: James Fogarty, Jon Froehlich My primary research explores the current strategies gamers with disabilities use during the game adoption process, to advise game developers, publishers, and distributors on how they can better support these practices. This work seeks to address research questions across the three main phases of the "game adoption process":
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Accessible Tabletop Game Modification ◈ Research & Consulting
This research focuses on identifying access barriers in tabletop and board games and developing modifications to make the games more accessible. These modifications can take a wide range of approaches including physical manipulation of game assets, development of digital tools, and design of alternative game modes and gameplay styles. As part of this work, I have also had the opportunity to professionally consult for Exploding Kittens on several of their games, identifying access barriers and designing workarounds and game variants to improve the games' accessibility. Publications & Presentations
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Accessible Data Visualization Experiences ◆ Research
Project Collaborators: John Thompson, Bongshin Lee, Alper Sarikaya, Ed Cutrell In this project, we aim to design and develop a system that enables Blind & Low Vision Screen Reader Users to meaningfully interact with web-based data visualizations using an off-the-shelf screen reader, with a particular emphasis on exposing the communicative intent and functionality of a visualization. To design such a tool, we use co-design methods with a team of BLV individuals, and iteratively design, prototype, & evaluate our tool in collaboration with our design partners. This project is a collaboration with the MSR EPIC & Ability teams, and was part of my 2022 summer internship work. Publications
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CREATE Accessible Esports Showcase ◈ Service & Research
In March 2023, I co-organized UW CREATE's first Accessible Esports Showcase, which brought together teams from industry, academia, and community organizations in the Seattle area to highlight ongoing work to make gaming more accessible. The event also provided a space for people with various disabilities to try out new access technologies and game modifications, in hopes of making access-hacking more approachable to all. [ Event Coverage ] |
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Repairing Android Game Inaccessibility ◆ Research
Project Advisors: James Fogarty, Jake Wobbrock Project Collaborators: Mingyuan Zhong This project involves identifying, characterizing, and repairing accessibility barriers in Android games. This work seeks to address many different research questions, including:
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Personalized and "Unprofessional" Audio Descriptions ◆ Research
Project Collaborators: Kelly Mack, Emma McDonnell Building on the current practices people with disabilities and their friends use to describe video content, can we find a way to improve audio descriptions to be better tailored to the type of content the listener wants described? We use the term "unprofessional" lovingly here: much "professional" audio description strives to provide an objective, unbiased lens, which is very effective and important in some contexts! But a movie night with friends doesn't need to be "professional," and people who rely on audio descriptions should have the option to let loose and be a bit "unprofessional" every now and then. |
Past Projects
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Animal Crossing, Families, and COVID-19 ◆ Research
Project Advisors: Jin Ha Lee, Katy E. Pearce, Jason C. Yip In this project, we are working to develop & propose design guidelines for game designers and developers to support collaborative play in families and coping with global crisis, based on interviews about engagement with Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Publications
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"JPEGson Pollock" ◇ Creative Project
This is a computational art project that I've been working on for several years, in which I've created a tool to take the input pixels of an digital image, turn them into "balls of paint" in a constrained 3D space, and the SPLAT them onto the "canvas" and output the result. The project is definitely inspired by the work of Jackson Pollock, but oddly enough, his pieces produce some of the least interesting results (imo). [ Imgur Gallery ] |
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"Another Arrow to the Knee: Alternatives to Town Guards in Fantasy RPG's" ◇ Creative Project
This speculative design RPG module was developed for Coda Game Collective's 2020 "Post-Police Design Challenge" Game Jam. The module seeks to question the ubiquity of police & policing in fantasy games (most frequently manifested as "Town Guards"), characterize the ways in which these are used, and provide alternatives to help RPG worldbuilders to imagine and create police-free worlds. [ itch.io Link ] |
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End-User Automation of Smart Home Devices through Trigger-Action Programming ◆ Research This project involved enabling and empowering non-technical end-users of smart-hom devices to automate their devices by creating rules and constraints with Trigger-Action Programming (TAP). In my time on the project, I contributed to the design of the system, developed the back-end of our end-user web app, and helped run & analyze the results of a user study. Publications
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the parasite (2017) ◈ Research / Creative Project An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) in which incoming first-year students at the University of Chicago worked together to unravel the mystery of a secretive organization known only as "PS". This transmedia game & research project was a collaboration with a large interdisciplinary team; full design credits can be found on the Project Archives (linked below). [Project Archives | Wired article | UChicago Magazine article & photo gallery] |