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Accessibility Advocate

Stacy Branham is committed to inclusive digital technologies, particularly for the visually impaired.

Stacy Branham, a UC Irvine associate professor of informatics
“We all create and share digital artifacts every day, so it’s actually everyone’s responsibility to be aware of and practice digital accessibility,” says Stacy Branham, a UC Irvine associate professor of informatics. Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

On May 3, Stacy Branham helped host a landmark outreach event to support visually impaired high school students in Orange County. With 58 participants attending in person and 18 online, the gathering brought together a diverse group, including 12 blind and low-vision high school students; seven UC Irvine affiliates; 18 teachers of the visually impaired; and numerous UC Irvine faculty, staff and student allies.

The event, which drew attendees from school districts in Irvine, Huntington Beach, Los Alamitos and Garden Grove, was a resounding success, reflecting Branham’s ongoing commitment to accessibility and inclusion.

The UC Irvine associate professor of informatics’ journey began in a challenging university environment for women in computer science. “When I walked into my first computer science classroom, I looked around the room, and it was a sea of men. I felt like I didn’t belong,” Branham says.

Despite the odds, she got a bachelor’s degree in 2007 at Virginia Tech, where only 4.2 percent of graduates in computer science were women. Initially skeptical of women’s computing groups, Branham eventually became an advocate for gender equality in the field.

After earning a Ph.D. in computer science at Virginia Tech, she pursued a postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. There, Branham worked under Shaun Kane, who developed a screen reader for touch-screen phones, revolutionizing accessibility for blind users.

“In 2010, with the first all-touch-screen phone, there was nothing for blind people to access,” she says. “What he did was come up with the idea of making gestures on the screen.” This experience profoundly influenced her career direction.

Branham’s background as a military brat – moving frequently across Louisiana, Virginia, Indiana and Massachusetts – instilled in her a resilience and adaptability that would serve her well in academia. After her postdoc year, she became a lecturer at UMBC, teaching an introductory computer science class that emphasized accessibility for diverse students. In addition, Branham directed her own research lab at UMBC, which she called the Inclusive Studio for Innovative Technology and Education. In 2018, she joined UC Irvine as an assistant professor.

“Over the past six years, I have employed students with a wide range of gender and disability identities, including several blind students,” Branham says. “My students and I co-created our values statement, which includes as a foundational tenet that we cannot build inclusive technologies without first building an inclusive research and design team.”

Her commitment to inclusion also led her to become involved with a National Science Foundation-funded effort called AccessComputing, which is aimed at ensuring that people with disabilities can become computer scientists.

Read the full article in UCI News.

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