The Speech Accessibility Project has been named to the first-ever Forbes Accessibility 100 list.

The list includes the top 100 global impact-makers in accessibility-related fields like communication, mobility, education, software, consumer products, robotics, sports and recreation, travel, the workplace, the arts and more.

“This recognition is a true honor, and shows that we’re making a difference through our work,” said Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the project’s leader. “Our project is incredibly collaborative and includes experts from departments across the University of Illinois campus.

“This honor also extends to the dozens of partners we’ve worked with, and the people who have recorded their voices to help improve speech recognition technology.”

The University of Illinois leads the project with funding from Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft. It aims to make voice recognition technology more useful for people with a range of diverse speech patterns and disabilities. So far, it has recorded the speech of people with Parkinson’s disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and those who have had a stroke.

The projects records the speech of participants. Annotators make note of what the participants are saying in the recordings. The companies funding the research have access to the data to train their own speech recognition tech. Later, the recordings are available to universities, researchers and companies who agree to the project’s data use agreement.

So far, the project’s has helped Microsoft make improvements on its Azure AI Speech platform and hosted a competition that showed dramatic reductions in word error rates compared to current open source tools.

This is the first time Forbes has created an Accessibility 100 list.

 “Accessibility is a fascinating space that has never been captured like this before,” said Alan Schwarz, Forbes’ assistant managing editor who spearheaded the project. “There are lone innovators, juggernaut tech companies, startups. They are revolutionizing how people get around, learn, communicate, work, play sports, travel, and so much more. Their impact on people’s lives is monumental – and will only be getting more so soon."