AIRC Team

The Applied Intelligence Research Centre has a diverse team.

Tlamelo Makati

Research staff
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Tlamelo did her undergrad in Mechatronics Engineering and a short course on Drone Tech and Data science. She is currently a partner in a start-up called Anton Tech. She was recently an intern with the UN Environment Programme doing research on modern technologies and disaster management. She started her PhD journey in September 2021, sponsored by The SFI – CRT, through ML-Labs. Her research is on web accessibility. As the World Wide Web has become a ubiquitous platform for all kinds of everyday activities such as retail, entertainment, communication work, and education. The usability and accessibility of the web impact users of these services to varying degrees causing irritation to some and outright exclusion to others. People with disabilities and users of Assistive ICT such as screen readers, Switch devices and alternative I/O are particularly impacted by inaccessible websites. The response has been in implementing Accessibility Standards and Guidelines and European Standards which embrace these. These guidelines are organized around the principles of Perceivable, Operable Understandable and Robust content. They specify requirements such as Alternative Text for images and captioning for videos. Recent work has looked at the role of how AI and ML can help meet these guidelines. This has produced tools for creating alternative text for images and auto-captioning for videos. These techniques have been aggregated into intelligent overlays with varying degrees of success. However, problems with current versions of these technologies is they don’t work or only partially work in many instances causing major frustrations. The question that her project addresses is what useful role ML play in can making websites more accessible. Where the ML tools can best be deployed in development lifecycles, how they can be supported through strategies like co-design and active inclusion. Of insight to this work is how intelligent web analytics and data insights feed into the improvement of ML and web accessibility technologies.