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

Entry requirements

Open to UK or international candidates. Staring in October 2026.

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

How to apply

Complete our online application form.

In addition, you must email the following documents to cts@surrey.ac.uk; putting ‘ADA expression of interest’ and your name in the subject line.

1. A research proposal for one of the above research projects, structured as follows:

• Number of the research theme you are addressing
• My take on the theme
• Research questions
• Theoretical framework
• Methodologies
• Significance of the research.

Word limit: 1,000 words

Document name: YourLastName_YourFirstName_RP

2. An applicant motivation letter that:

• Demonstrates your fit to project
• Highlights your career development aims.

Word limit: 500 words

Document name: YourLastName_YourFirstName_ML

3. Your CV

Page limit: Max. 2 pages; including your academic qualifications

Document name: YourLastName_YourFirstName_CV

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to an online recruitment workshop in April/May 2025 designed to select balanced cohorts of applicants best suited to benefit from the ADA PhD training and contribute to multi-disciplinary teamwork to address real-world accessibility challenges.

Funding

Fully funded 4-year studentship (48 months of full-time study) covers home or international tuition fees, maintenance at UKRI base levels (£20,780 for 2025/26) and £10,000 to support research and training needs.

Enquiries

Professor Sabine Braun s.braun@surrey.ac.uk

Aimee Savage aimee.savage@surrey.ac.uk

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