Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship in AI-Enabled Digital Accessibility (ADA)

About the Project

Digital media is central to our engagement with public information, news, government services, healthcare, finance, education, culture and entertainment, and facilitates communication and social interaction. Ensuring accessibility to digital media for all is therefore crucial. However, accessibility can be difficult to achieve because engaging with digital media often involves complex language-based and/or multimodal interactions that require all senses. This becomes more difficult when a modality or language a user understands is not available or accessible. To bridge this gap, different forms of translation are employed, either across different modalities, by translating speech into subtitles or sign language, standard text into a simpler version or visual content into a verbal description, or across languages, e.g., translating into a minority language.

With the increase in digital content, accessibility needs cannot be met by human resources alone. The ADA network will therefore enable doctoral researchers to leverage AI in the context of digital accessibility. Acknowledging that language, sound, and vision continue to present difficult challenges for AI, ADA will equip graduates with the skills to develop human-centric AI-enabled solutions that preserve accuracy, narrative coherence and other quality parameters in digital content.

As a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in the ADA network, you will have the opportunity to develop a project in ADA, working across disciplines such as language, translation, media accessibility and design studies, in combination with engineering, computer science, cognitive and social science. You will enhance your understanding of accessibility as a core concept and explore diverse research methods, combining advancements in AI with human expertise, to deliver and implement personalised accessibility solutions.

You will benefit from supervision by interdisciplinary teams of world-leading academics, interact with other researchers in the network and have access to masterclasses, lectures, workshops, and other activities to build and consolidate your skills in this exciting new field.