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

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.

The ADA network focuses on six key research themes:

1. AI for Audiovisual Accessibility: Exploring AI-enabled solutions for converting audiovisual content into accessible formats, such as audio description for people with sight loss and other audiences.
2. AI for Speech-to-Text Accessibility: Advancing automatic speech recognition and related technologies to improve real-time and post-production accessibility of speech content for different use cases.
3. AI for Text Simplification and Comprehension: Investigating how AI can enhance text accessibility by simplifying complex language, improving readability, and adapting content for diverse users, including neurodiverse users.
4. AI for Cross-Language Accessibility: Developing AI-powered tools for multilingual accessibility through translation, interlingual subtitles and interpreting to support global content reach and inclusivity.
5. AI-Enhanced Assistive Communication Technologies: Creating AI-enabled assistive tools, such as voice assistants and chatbots to improve user experiences for diverse users across digital platforms.
6. AI for Personalising Accessible Communication: Developing novel methods for tailoring digital accessibility solutions to individual user preferences and needs while ensuring ethical AI practices.

As a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in the ADA network, you will have the opportunity to develop a project under one of the above themes, 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.

Open to any UK or international candidates. 

We are seeking applications from excellent and enthusiastic candidates who are interested in joining the ADA network to collaborate with other researchers and contribute to a rich environment for themselves and their research community. 

You will need to meet the entry requirements of our PhD programme.

Research groups:

Centre for Translation Studies, Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI.

Further groups and supervisors, please see the ADA PhD programme page.