Amy Hurst
· Professor of Occupational Therapy and Integrated Digital Media; Director of Ability ProjectNew York University · Occupational Therapy
Active 1996–2026
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About
Amy Hurst is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Occupational Therapy at NYU Steinhardt and the Department of Technology, Culture and Society at the Tandon School of Engineering. She is the director of the Ability Project, an interdisciplinary research space dedicated to exploring the intersection between disability and technology. Dr. Hurst holds an M.S. and Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from the HCII at Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on understanding social problems and identifying opportunities for technology to empower individuals impacted by those issues. She employs qualitative methods to analyze environments, design and build technology that fits within environmental constraints, and evaluate these technologies with target users. Her work sits at the intersection of assistive technology, interaction design, and engineering education, contributing to the development of innovative solutions to improve accessibility and inclusion.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Human–computer interaction
- Multimedia
- Sociology
- Engineering
- Electrical engineering
- Artificial Intelligence
- World Wide Web
- Computer graphics (images)
- Medicine
Selected publications
2020 · 40 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingToday, music creation software and hardware are central to the workflow of most professional composers, producers, and songwriters. Music is an aural art form, but it is notated graphically, and highly visual mainstream technologies pose significant accessibility barriers to blind and visually impaired users. Very few studies address the current state of accessibility in music technologies, and fewer propose alternative designs. To address a lack of understanding about the experiences of blind a…
ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing · 2021 · 29 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingThere are a growing number of jobs related to web development, yet there is little formal literature about the accessibility of web development with a screen reader. This article describes research to explore (1) web development accessibility issues and their impact on blind learners and programmers; (2) tools and strategies used to address issues; and (3) opportunities for creating inclusive web development curriculum and supportive tools. We conducted a Comprehensive Literature Review (CLR) to…
2021 · 17 citations
Math graphs need to be accessible to People with Visual Impairments (PVI). While tactile graphics are a common way for PVI to access math graphs, their use becomes complicated in remote learning. To make math graphs more accessible in remote education, we focused on sonification, the use of non-speech sound. In this study, we designed techniques of sonification of math graphs to introduce the concept of discontinuity in calculus to PVI. First, we conducted a remote interview with six participant…
2022-10-22 · 16 citations
articleOpen accessDigital fabrication methods have been shown to be an effective method for producing customized assistive technology (AT). However, the skills required to utilize these tools currently require a high level of technical skill. Previous research showed that integration of these skills within physical therapy training is appropriate but that the level of technical difficulty required can be an issue. We worked to address these issues by introducing a group of PT students to maker concepts and having…
Designing Educational Materials for a Blind Arduino Workshop
2020 · 15 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingThere is an overall shortage of accessible educational material available for blind and low vision learners. This shortage is especially pronounced in the domain of electronics, where the materials are historically visually-rendered and complex. To address this, we took a qualitative approach to designing and evaluating tactile graphics and textual descriptions when building circuits. To gain an understanding of their efficacy, we provided a circuit description [3], component diagrams (Figure 4)…
Recent grants
EAGER: Exploring Appropriate 3D Printing Paradigms in Special Education
NSF · $160k · 2014–2018
Frequent coauthors
- 64 shared
C Michalak
University of Geneva
- 64 shared
Andreas Savin
Laboratoire de Chimie Théorique
- 64 shared
Hans‐Joachim Freund
Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society
- 64 shared
Paul Geerlings
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- 64 shared
W. Kohn
- 64 shared
Pietro Cortona
CentraleSupélec
- 64 shared
Jacques Weber
- 64 shared
Jean‐Luc Brédas
University of Arizona
Awards & honors
- Best Paper Technical Award Winner (2022)
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