HOW WE ROLL
H U M A N- C E N T E R E D C O M P U T I N G R E S E A R C H E R
Madison Russell
Madison Russell, 20, lives with juvenile arthritis and has wanted to make technology more inclusive and accessible since she was 14. When she started using a wheelchair in 2018, she didn’t think, why me? She thought, why not?
Making the Virtual World a Reality for Wheelc Making the virtual world a more accessible place has always been an interest for Madison Russell, even before she became a wheelchair user thanks to syringomyelia, a rare disease that causes cysts to form on the spinal cord. She thought she’d devote her life to dancing but quit at age 11 when her juvenile arthritis made dancing too dangerous. After attending a summer camp for kids with juvenile arthritis, some who used wheelchairs, she became sensitive to how inaccessible and isolating the world could be. “I had friends who had to stay home all the time or couldn’t use a cell phone because their fingers were too damaged,” she says. “Seeing that is what initially gave me my interest in accessibility.” Her father was a software engineer, so she learned to type before she could write or speak and how to make websites when she was 9. She took a computer science class in high school and realized she had an aptitude for it. “I liked programming,” she says. “I was good at it and as I got older, I realized how many things you could do with
CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT: I just got an Apple Watch with wheelchair mode, so instead of counting steps, it counts pushes and changes the calorie count for wheelchair users.
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NEW MOBILITY
it. One program can change so many lives.” She knows this firsthand because in high school she created a pen pal app to help closeted teens connect with one another. The app didn’t come to market, but it resonated with her as a queer teen fearing she’d lose friends if she came out in her rural southern hometown of Hiram, Georgia. It resonated with thousands more, too. It went viral, gained national media attention, and earned her a scholarship to The Rochester Institute of Technology’s first graduating class of the Human-Centered Computing Program, where she focuses on accessible and instructional technology. She is currently interning at the Center for Accessibility and Inclusion Research at RIT, where she studies educational accommodation for graduate students with disabilities and ways to include wheelchair users in virtual reality gaming. “I had one roommate who I watched play Beat Saber in the living room. He was standing, turning around, and moving across the room using motion
WHAT WOULD TELL YOUR PREDIAGNOSIS SELF? It’s not the end of the world. Life looks great so far, and it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.
