When most people think about accessibility, they picture ramps, elevators, or designated pathways. But for many people with disabilities, navigating a university campus requires something harder to see: a constantly evolving network of lived experience, shared knowledge, and quiet problem-solving.
Lillian Chin, assistant professor in the Chandra Family Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin (Texas ECE), wants to change that. Chin and her students brought together researchers from across the Forty Acres for a project that pairs artificial intelligence with community-driven design to surface that hidden expertise and put it to work. One project they are working on to address this is an app that creates a live, searchable map of campus restrooms.
Chin was recently recognized as an Accessibility Champion by UT Austin Disability and Access and the Disability Cultural Center for her leadership on the Hack the Camp-us (HtC) project. Formed through UT's Good Systems seed grant program, which explores how AI can be designed to reflect human values and societal needs, the HtC team builds AI-enabled tools that address long-term infrastructural barriers for people with disabilities on campus.
Their starting premise: the engineering that disabled people already do to navigate UT every day is valuable, and technology can codify and amplify it to the entire UT community.
"The Hack the Campus team is especially interested in elevating the knowledge that disabled people at UT individually use to navigate campus life,” said Chin. “What hacks do disabled people at UT already use to get around campus? How is this knowledge currently documented and shared? And how can we turn this individual knowledge into infrastructural tools that are long-lasting and accessible?”
Picture (l-r): Bill Fan and Lillian Chin
Construction zones, campus events, and day-to-day variation in a person's own abilities all mean that what's accessible one week may not be the next. So they worked together to build an app that takes all of these ever-changing parts of daily life on campus and turned into a living guide for navigating campus.
"There's a lot of knowledge within the disabled community about campus wayfinding that is hard to share," said Chin, "like indoor-outdoor shortcuts or where the most accessible bathrooms are. This knowledge is also not necessarily reflected in the datasets that Campus Operations uses to make long-term planning decisions. We're interested in seeing if AI can help solve these scale challenges, especially in a timeframe that current students can benefit from."
A Restroom Revolution
Through interviews with community members, a survey and conversations with the the UT Campus Operations and Longhorn Developers' Mobilize team, restroom access quickly emerged as a major issue. Urban studies scholars Rob Kitchin and Robin Law coined the term "bladder's leash" to describe this dynamic: the way a disabled person's movement through civic space is tethered to their access to bathrooms.
The interviews brought the concept home. One participant described dedicating an entire day at the start of each semester to mapping accessible bathrooms and building entrances along their schedule. Another said restroom access shapes how they plan every day.
The team's proposed solution is an app that converts a dataset collected by campus accessibility organization OnTheMoov through their Restroom Revolution initiative into a live, searchable map of campus bathrooms. Each restroom is graded against concrete accessibility criteria, such as stall dimensions, and users can submit new reports directly.
The team envisions an AI-powered image analysis pipeline, modeled on research from the University of Washington, that uses computer vision to automatically evaluate submitted photos against accessibility standards. OnTheMoov has expressed interest in collaborating, and the team has prototyped the concept in Figma.
"Accessibility is at an interesting confluence of things," said Bill Fan, one of the graduate student researchers in Chin’s MERGe Lab leading the project. "It's often a public service and infrastructural, yet also incredibly specific to individuals, unlike, say, a bridge or bus line. It's also something where technology can have either a really positive or a negligible impact depending on the implementation."
What’s Next
What began as a class project pilot has grown into a full-scale participatory design research study planned for the coming year. The team is recruiting a larger and more diverse cohort of participants.
Their spring interviewees with disabilities all had mobility disabilities, and the researchers aim to represent a wider range of disability types going forward. They are also planning facilitated workshops that bring students and UT staff from disability and accessibility communities together to shape the design collaboratively.
On the technical side, the team plans to deploy a working instance of the app in the spring semester, conduct a user study, and submit their findings to an academic venue the following May. A first milestone has already been reached: a report on the team’s pilot study has been accepted for publication at the ACM ASSETS Posters & Demos track.
The longer-term vision is integration, not isolation. The team has been reaching out to other organizations around campus who are also working on tools for campus accessibility. One such group is the Longhorn-Developers Mobilize team. Integrating platforms together could give disabled students a more complete picture of campus in one place
"There's a long history of engineers designing gadgets, sometimes called disability dongles, that are supposed to be helpful for people with disabilities but really solve imaginary problems to make engineers feel good," Chin said. "I'm really interested in how I can improve accessibility concretely for people's everyday experiences, which is only possible through this interdisciplinary, cross-college effort across the university."
Fan put it more plainly. “I remember when generative AI came out, people would say, 'I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes'. I think this study has been good proof that there's actually lots of straightforward ways for AI to meaningfully improve people's lives --- we just need to listen to what their community needs.”
The Team
In addition to Chin and Fan, contributors to the project include UT iSchool students, Stephanie Wang, Katherine Ogle, and Jitendra Rajde, as well as UT iSchool assistant professor Earl Huff, Jr. and his student Shaini Nanayakkara. Community partners include current OnTheMoov co-president Camden Ross, and OnTheMoov alumni Aria Welch and Sophie Snapp, who organized Restroom Revolution last year with Fabiola Amaya.
The Hack the Camp-us team includes Lillian Chin — assistant professor, Chandra Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering; Leah Chong — assistant professor, Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cockrell School of Engineering; Patrick Benfield — assistant professor of practice, College of Natural Sciences; Angela Standridge — director, Texas Technology Access Program, School of Social Work; Sandy Magaña — professor, School of Social Work; Jo Hsu, associate professor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, College of Liberal Arts; Alison Kafer — associate professor, Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies, College of Liberal Arts; DiMitri Higginbotham — assistant professor of practice, School of Design and Creative Technologies, College of Fine Arts; Earl Huff, Jr. — assistant professor, School of Information.
The work was featured in a paper presented at the Association of Computational Machinery (ACM) ASSETS conference in Porto, Portugal that can be read here.
