Designing for specific disabilities
This weekend the Vanderbilt Wond’ry hosted their 2nd TOM hackathon. TOM stands for Tikkum Olam Makers. Tikkum Olam means “Fix the world” in hebrew.
“We’re a global movement of communities connecting makers, designers, developers and engineers with people with disabilities (aka — ‘Need-Knowers’) to develop technological solutions for everyday challenges. Designs are free and available for any user to adapt for their needs!”
I was lucky enough to work with three teams over the course of the weekend, I’ll go over each team below.
Team Bridges
Bridges is an organization here in Nashville that focuses on services for the deaf and hard of hearing. The original “problem” bridges came in with happened to be solved by a google plugin. The minute I heard there were engineers there to focus on a problem for people who are hard of hearing I poked my head into their room. My mom is HOH and I have wanted to create an apple watch app for live closed captions for her and other people. People who are hard of hearing often miss certain words or can’t hear at all what someone is saying in particularly loud environments. When they watch TV closed captions help them follow what’s happening much better, for months I’ve been collaborating with my mom talking about a potential solution for real world interactions that could mirror how she benefits from CC on TV in real life. So, I poked my head in and pitched my idea, luckily Demetri was available and had extensive iOS knowledge! We worked on how we could harness Siri’s speech to text functionality and have the phone act as a microphone and feed the words to the watch. Demetri went heads down for a few hours and emerged with an extremely well working prototype! During the “science fair” part of the weekend, we had a mom of one of the kids involved come by. She happened to be HOH as well, we showed her the app and her jaw dropped. We hope to be able to release it under the TOM umbrella so anyone else who could benefit from this could use it!
Team Alex
Alex is an 8 year old boy who has Autism. As part of his Autism he has Echolalia, this means he repeats the last thing someone said to him. This causes struggles for his parents when they are trying to get him to let them know what he wants. I spent some time with his mom before the hackathon over google hangout to learn more about his specific needs. She mentioned that there are a lot of programs to help with communication but no simple choice boards. She specifically mentioned that a lot of apps for people with autism or aphasia rely on generic cartoons of things that create a barrier for understanding. She wanted to be able use images of the actual things she wanted Alex to choose between.
I worked with her to create some wireframes before the hackathon, and provided the team with some description of how the screens interact with each other. We created in one weekend a simple choice board called “Pik it!” It allows someone to create a board with 2, 3 or 4 options and choose any pictures to drop in. When they add in this picture they also record audio of them saying the word, when he picks the item the audio plays so there can be some association of the word with the resulting action. This will hopefully allow his mom to aid him in making meaningful choices as he gets older.
Team Thomais (AKA Team Rainbow)
Thomais (AKA Rainbow) is a 10 year old who is on the spectrum, and struggles with parsing out information when it comes to complicated subjects. Dr. Teresa and I were lucky enough to join this team after they had done some original idea exploration, and lend our expertise in making web apps. We worked to create a tool we called “Steppy” that allows a parent to work with their child to break complex tasks into individual steps. The child can then walk through these individual steps without the distraction of the other steps being present. We worked with Yadira, Thomais’ mom a lot on what is baseline functionality for the weekend, and landed on text being accompanied by an image on a page for each step. Explore the app here: https://steppy.netlify.com/ (to add a new tutorial click the gears in the top right).
Over the weekend I got to learn all about Thomais’ art she does, for each letter of the alphabet she mixes a food and an animal, for example she created donut dragon, a dragon whose body is made of a chocolate donut! She loves art and color so much it was super important that this app be colorful to keep Thomais interested, so we added in some functionality that gives each tutorial two colors that are associated with it, that generates a gradient. We hope this app enables people who need to see things in a more chunked out, granular way grasp concepts better than they would have previously!
See Thomais’ mom’s blog about the weekend here: http://autismhappykingdom.com/index.php/2019/01/21/at-some-point-we-all-need-help/
