Integrated Web Accessibility Guidelines for Users on the Autism Spectrum - from Specification to Implementation

This research presented a compendium of web interface design guidelines and their implementation on a transport-planning website based on the needs and preferences of users on the autism spectrum. Results highlighted the importance of having simple navigation and meaningful headings, icons, labels and text to facilitate understanding and readability; these findings offer guidelines for the design of web user interfaces to continue improving the web experience of autistic users, and therefore of the whole community

Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives

Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials. Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations. In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Diminished neural adaptation during implicit learning in autism

Neuroimaging studies have shown evidence of disrupted neural adaptation during learning in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in several types of tasks, potentially stemming from frontal-posterior cortical underconnectivity (Schipul et al., 2012). The aim of the current study was to examine neural adaptations in an implicit learning task that entails participation of frontal and posterior regions. Sixteen high-functioning adults with ASD and sixteen neurotypical control participants were trained on and performed an implicit dot pattern prototype learning task in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session. During the preliminary exposure to the type of implicit prototype learning task later to be used in the scanner, the ASD participants took longer than the neurotypical group to learn the task, demonstrating altered implicit learning in ASD. After equating task structure learning, the two groups’ brain activation differed during their learning of a new prototype in the subsequent scanning session. The main findings indicated that neural adaptations in a distributed task network were reduced in the ASD group, relative to the neurotypical group, and were related to ASD symptom severity. Functional connectivity was reduced and did not change as much during learning for the ASD group, and was related to ASD symptom severity. These findings suggest that individuals with ASD show altered neural adaptations during learning, as seen in both activation and functional connectivity measures. This finding suggests why many real-world implicit learning situations may pose special challenges for ASD

Footprints of emergence

It is ironic that the management of education has become more closed while learning has become more open, particularly over the past 10-20 years. The curriculum has become more instrumental, predictive, standardized, and micro-managed in the belief that this supports employability as well as the management of educational processes, resources, and value. Meanwhile, people have embraced interactive, participatory, collaborative, and innovative networks for living and learning. To respond to these challenges, we need to develop practical tools to help us describe these new forms of learning which are multivariate, self-organised, complex, adaptive, and unpredictable. We draw on complexity theory and our experience as researchers, designers, and participants in open and interactive learning to go beyond conventional approaches. We develop a 3D model of landscapes of learning for exploring the relationship between prescribed and emergent learning in any given curriculum. We do this by repeatedly testing our descriptive landscapes (or footprints) against theory, research, and practice across a range of case studies. By doing this, we have not only come up with a practical tool which can be used by curriculum designers, but also realised that the curriculum itself can usefully be treated as emergent, depending on the dynamicsbetween prescribed and emergent learning and how the learning landscape is curated

SENSORY SPACES: SENSORY LEARNING – AN EXPERIMENTAL APPROACH TO EDUCATING OUR FUTURE DESIGNERS TO DESIGN AUTISM SCHOOLS.

Universities and design schools have a responsibility to ensure that the education of future designers enables design for special populations, in this case specifically children with autism. This paper presents a case study of an autism defined experimental teaching-led design project, within a first-year university Interior Architecture course, on which the author is a tutor. It draws on the author’s extensive working knowledge of autism issues, incorporating mediation between SEN schools and design students, and employing research informed teaching. The project involves a new local free school for autism, at a temporary site. The experiment is designed to challenge students, emphasising the importance of understanding how primary research, accessed directly from the end users, informs progressive design thinking. It attempts to influence their design work in subsequent years at university and in practice, and facilitate bridging the gap between academic research and real-life application. This paper seeks to identify how an autism defined project, focussed on student-centred learning and encompassing choosing sessions with children with ASD, can be taught in the first year of undergraduate study. Further, it aims to analyse how the teaching styles and content of a partially ‘live’ community design project impact on the participants. This is achieved by describing the details and challenges of the project together with the interactions between the students and the school. It concludes that the project adds value to the student experience, builds student confidence and eliminates pre-conceived ideas surrounding autism. It shows that design can be an interactive process between university and special schools. Equally, the pitfalls of a live project of this nature are highlighted, as is the need for modification before similar projects are reproducible as viable educational models

Training University Students About Autism Spectrum Disorder Through Outreach to School-Based Speech-Language Pathologists

Training preprofessional students about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is crucial, particularly since students with ASD are represented on the caseloads of approximately 90% of school-based speech-language pathologists (SLPs). When this training can occur within the context of an outreach program, the results of such programming can be mutually beneficial for the individuals served as well as the students. Through the present program, six graduate students and four undergraduate students created materials for 15 SLPs working in the schools in a significantly underserved region of the United States. Students created nearly 800 materials for the SLPs to use in therapy with children with ASD. These included visual schedules and picture/icon cards and social stories. Students completed a survey and wrote a reflection paper about what they learned. Survey data from all participants indicated that the program met the needs of the SLPs and furthered students’ skills in creating materials and understanding more about the demands of working as an SLP in the schools. Implications for undergraduate and graduate training including increasing student knowledge and confidence as well as gaining student perspectives on the experience and collaboration are discussed. Future directions for extensions of this training program are proposed