PhD Studentship: 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.

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.

Supervisors: Professor Sabine Braun, Professor Philip Jackson, Dr Elena Davitti, Professor Constantin Orasan, Professor Christine Hine and other faculty colleagues. You can view the full list of groups and supervisors on this link: AI-Enabled Digital Accessibility (ADA) PhD research course | University of Surrey.

Entry requirements

Open to any UK or international candidates. Starting in January 2025. Later start dates may be possible, please contact Professor Sabine Braun once the deadline passes.

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

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. 

How to apply

Applications should be submitted via the AI-Enabled Digital Accessibility PhD programme page.

You must upload a research proposal and motivation letter following the instructions on the programme page, as well as your full CV and any transcripts of previous academic qualifications. You should enter ‘Leverhulme Scholarship’ under the ‘Please provide details of your funding’ sections of your application.

Funding

Fully funded 4 year studentship (48 months of full-time study) covers home or international tuition fees, maintenance at UKRI base levels (£19,237 for 2024/25), and £10,000 to support the individual student’s research and training needs. Funded in competition with multiple projects.  

Application deadline

13/10/2024

Enquiries

Contact Professor Sabine Braun

Ref

PGR-2324-112

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