A method of creating personae for children with autism spectrum condition: application and revision

Purpose: Personae are simple tools for describing users, their characteristics and their goals. They are valuable tools when designing for a specific group of users, such as children with autism spectrum condition (ASC). The purpose of this paper is to propose, validate and revise a methodology for creating accurate, data grounded personae for children with ASC. Design/methodology/approach: The proposed method is based mainly on Cooper et al.’s (2007) persona construction method. It proposes gathering and analysing qualitative data from users and experts to either create a new persona or extend an existing one. The method is then applied to create personae for the design of a visual programming tool for children with ASC. Based on the results of the application, observations and lessons learnt, a revised version of the method is proposed. Findings: The method’s combined use of user data and expert knowledge produced a set of personae that have been well reviewed by experts so far. The method’s use of a questionnaire to validate personae also produced relevant qualitative feedback. On review, possible downsides of extending existing personae were identified. Therefore, a revised method was introduced, eliminating the need to extend existing personae, and stressing the importance of utilising user data, expert knowledge and feedback. Originality/value: This paper addresses the need for a well-defined method for creating data grounded personae that accurately describe the characteristics and goals of children with ASC. Such personae can be used to design and develop more accessible and usable products

On accessible Visual Programming Tools for children with Autism Spectrum Condition and additional learning disabilities

Visual Programming Tools (VPTs) provide a visual programming and execution environment, in addition to other visual resources and tools appropriate for creating visual programs for a particular domain. Several VPTs have been created for teaching children to program at an early age. Research on the use of these tools to teach programming, academic and non-academic skills has reported positive results. However, children with learning disabilities including those also diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) are left out of research in this area. Therefore, this research aims to contribute to existing knowledge in this area by exploring the accessibility of existing VPTs for this group of users and creating design tools and recommendations for the design of accessible VPTs for this target group. This research began with the evaluation of the accessibility of the most popular VPT, Scratch. A user evaluation was conducted with seven children with learning disabilities, five of them were also diagnosed with ASC; three special education needs teachers were also interviewed as part of the evaluation. Analysis of the findings from this evaluation showed that the children faced several difficulties while using Scratch to create stories; and also identified the causes of the difficulties. Accessibility heuristics were derived from the identified 'causes of difficulties' and were used to evaluate the accessibility of three additional VPTs. The findings of this second evaluation showed that the assessed VPTs have features similar to those of Scratch that caused accessibility difficulties to the target group. In creating tools and recommendations for designing accessible VPTs, the research focused on children with ASC (with learning disabilities) due to the match between their reported preferences and the features of VPTs. A method of creating personae to represent their requirements and goals was created and used to create three data-grounded personae. Experts were then interviewed to propose a set of recommendations for designing accessible VPTs for the target group. Therefore, this research contributed methods for conducting accessibility evaluation of VPTs for children with learning disabilities and for creating personae for children with ASC; a theoretical model for the use of VPTs by children with learning disabilities in a class setting to achieve a learning goal; findings on the accessibility of existing VPTs for children with learning disabilities; and recommendations for designing accessible VPTs for children with ASC

Evaluating the accessibility of Scratch for children with cognitive impairments

Research on the use of interactive media as learning tools for children with cognitive impairments has focused mainly on employing predesigned content, rather than constructing new content. Visual programming tools could potentially provide cognitively impaired children with a platform that can enable them to create their own interactive media. However, very little is known about the accessibility of the tools. This study uses a novel approach to evaluate the accessibility of Scratch (a visual programming tool) for children with cognitive impairments by employing a Grounded Theory research method. The study was conducted with 9 participants: 2 special education teachers and 7 cognitively impaired children over a period of ten weeks. The children’s usage of Scratch was documented through screen capturing. In addition, semi structured interviews were conducted with the two teachers. Grounded Theory based analysis was performed using QSR NVivo, which led to the identification of: accessibility issues; causal conditions; contexts; strategies employed to tackle issues; and consequences. Thus, the findings of this research contribute to existing knowledge on the accessibility of visual programming tools and elucidate the experience of cognitively impaired children while using the tools