CV

Education

Ph.D. Student at the Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering. (advised by Prof Jennifer Mankoff) 2018 to present
B.Tech (HONS) and MS by Research in Computer Science and Engineering, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad. 2010 to 2015
Senior Secondary, P. Obul Reddy Public School. 2008 to 2010

Work experience

Research Fellow (advised by Dr. Manohar Swaminathan), Microsoft Research India, July2017 to July 2018.
- CodeScape: The goal is to explore the design and use of a Spatial Audio UI to improve IDE usability for visually impaired developers.
- CloudATM Financial services are not very accessible to people with visual impairments in India. We propose a new ATM software design to improve accessibility of ATM cash withdrawals for people with visual impairments.
Research Intern, Microsoft Research India, January 2017 to May 2017
- CodeTalk: A Visual Studio plugin to improve IDE accessibility for developers with visual impairments.
Consultant at Microsoft India RND LTD, Hyderabad, India, March 2016 to December 2016
- Office Accessibility on Android Worked in the team responsible for accessibility of Office Apps on Android. My technical abilities and expertise in accessibility enabled me to contribute at various stages of developing the Office apps; from prioritising different features and designing the right experience with the program managers to implementing and shipping these experiences with the engineering team. The product’s accessibility experience has received positive feedback from customers.
- Prototype to improve navigability in Microsoft Word The idea was to simplify navigating the complex UI of Microsoft word using voice input. This being my proposal I took a large role in driving it.
- Accessibility tests for Office apps on Android I was responsible for identifying accessibility issues in Office apps on Android. In addition to rooting out issues as per Microsoft’s Accessibility Standard (MAS), I was also responsible for identifying usability issues in the apps.

Projects

Supporting UI and layout design for developers with visual impairments: An effort to develop an alternative (non-visual) approach to UI and layout design.
CodeTalk: A Visual Studio plugin to Improve IDE accessibility to developers with visual impairments through improved code glanceability, navigability and real time access to IDE information.
CloudATM: An ATM infrastructure design proposed to improve accessibility of ATM cash transaction to visually impaired people. The re-design can be built on top of UPI.
CodeScape: A Spatial Audio UI design to improve developer productivity for visually impaired developers by introducing non-linearity in screen reader information access
Audio Rendering of Mathematical Content: Techniques using speech and non-speech audio to render mathematical content in audio.
Unified keyboard shortcut standard for screen readers: Every screen reader has its own style of keyboard shortcuts, makeing it difficult for visually impaired users to switch between different screen readers and platforms. The idea is to explore and propose guidelines for choosing keyboard shortcuts for screen readers and eventually come up with a universal keyboard shortcut mapping.

Publications

Significance of Paralinguistic Cues in the Synthesis of Mathematical Equations

Potluri.V, Rallabandi.S, Srivaastava.P and Prahallad.k. (2014). "Significance of Paralinguistic Cues in the synthesis of Mathematical Equations" International Conference on Natural Language Processing

CodeTalk: Improving Programming Environment Accessibility for Visually Impaired Developers

Potluri, V., Vaithilingam, P., Iyengar, S., Vidya, Y., Swaminathan, M., & Srinivasa, G. (2018, April). CodeTalk: Improving Programming Environment Accessibility for Visually Impaired Developers. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (p. 618). ACM.

Up to a Limit?: Privacy Concerns of Bystanders and Their Willingness to Share Additional Information with Visually Impaired Users of Assistive Technologies

Tousif Ahmed, Apu Kapadia, Venkatesh Potluri, and Manohar Swaminathan. 2018. Up to a Limit? Privacy Concerns of Bystanders and Their Willingness to Share Additional Information with Visually Impaired Users of Assistive Technologies. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 2, 3, Article 89 (September 2018), 27 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3264899

A Multi-Modal Approach for Blind and Visually Impaired Developers to Edit Webpage Designs

Venkatesh Potluri, Liang He, Christine Chen, Jon E. Froehlich, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2019. A Multi-Modal Approach for Blind and Visually Impaired Developers to Edit Webpage Designs. In The 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 612–614. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3308561.3354626

Navigating Graduate School with a Disability

Dhruv Jain, Venkatesh Potluri, and Ather Sharif. 2020. Navigating Graduate School with a Disability. In The 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 8, 1–11. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3373625.3416986

Examining Visual Semantic Understanding in Blind and Low-vision Technology Users

Venkatesh Potluri, Tadashi E Grindeland, Jon E. Froehlich, Jennifer Mankoff. 2021. Examining Visual Semantic Understanding in Blind and Low-Vision Technology Users. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’21), May 8–13, 2021, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 14 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445040

CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development

Venkatesh Potluri, Maulishree Pandey, Andrew Begel, Michael Barnett, and Scott Reitherman. 2022. CodeWalk: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed-Ability Collaborative Software Development. In Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 20, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3517428.3544812

Skills

Programming languages: C, C++, Python, CSharp
Scripting languages: Bash
Assistive technologies: JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver (Mac and IOS), Mobile Speak.

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Venkatesh Potluri

CV