Designing Conversational AI systems to support older adults with MCI necessitates robustness in handling complex and personalized interactions. In this study, we investigate how older adults with MCI experience, navigate and attempt to repair breakdowns while interacting with a voice-based AI system in their homes for medication management through the lens of interactional ”seams”. Through a 20-week in-home deployment with 7 participant dyads, we analyzed 844 interactions to identify interactional and conversational breakdowns and user repair strategies. Drawing on post-deployment interviews, we reflect on the nature of these breakdowns and older adults’ experiences of mitigating them. We further illustrate how older adults draw on their situated knowledge and environment to make sense of and recover from these disruptions, highlighting the cognitive effort required in doing so. Our findings emphasize the collaborative nature of interaction in human-AI contexts, and point to the need for voice assistants to better align with users’ expectations for memory, their routines and external resources in their environment. We conclude by discussing opportunities for voice assistants to integrate contextual knowledge from older adults’ sociotechnical environment and to facilitate more meaningful and user-centered interactions.
Technological interventions for the development of social skills among autistic children have shown promise. However, the majority of the tools have been developed from a high-resource and Western perspective and may not be culturally or materially appropriate for a low-resource environment. While the use of participatory and co-design approaches is strongly advocated for autism-related research, the direct involvement of autistic children is not always feasible due to the presence of social stigma and the constraints of the environment. In such cases, therapists and teachers are often engaged as proxies, yet the methodological implications of proxy-based co-design have not been sufficiently explored. In response to such shortcomings, this article presents a process-oriented methodological analysis of the co-design of POMA (Picture-to-Object Mapping Activities), a tangible UI-based iPad application developed to support the social skills of autistic children in Sri Lanka, with therapists and teachers acting as proxies. Through 10 rounds of iterative workshops, we present the evolution of co-design methods through breakdowns and negotiations across app critique, paper prototyping, wireframing evaluation, and two iterations of prototypes. Our analysis reveals methodological developments from (i) tensions in app critique from a Western perspective based on linguistic and cultural differences, (ii) resource constraints on participation, (iii) tensions in multidisciplinary co-design leading to design divergence and consolidation, (iv) material failures in environmental sensing leading to redesigns in tangible sensing, and (v) participant turnover leading to repeated onboarding and alignment. The findings highlight that proxy-based co-design in low-resource, culturally specific contexts is a dynamic and contingent process, requiring ongoing methodological adaptation rather than the straightforward application of established participatory practices. By focusing on challenges and adaptations, this article contributes empirically grounded methodological insights into proxy-based co-design for autism technologies, with implications for researchers working in resource-constrained and culturally diverse settings.
Autistic people often have an interest in and spend a substantial amount of time engaged with video games. Games can be supportive of their mental health and social needs and have been widely used for behavioral interventions among autistic people. However, the gaming experiences and preferences of autistic people themselves have not been thoroughly studied. To explore these experiences, we used a multi-method approach, analyzing game-related posts from a large autism-related subreddit and conducting a survey with 145 autistic people. The survey allowed us to further understand preferences around accessibility and sensory experiences, representation, and social experiences in communities that emerged in the Reddit posts. We found that games offering a sense of freedom, control, and creativity might be particularly appealing to autistic gamers. Discussions also emerged around what types of audio and visual sensory input were considered soothing and appropriate. Moreover, both the Reddit posts and survey responses highlighted the importance of accommodating diverse social preferences and providing accurate autistic representation. Overall, our findings offer insights into the gaming experiences and preferences of autistic gamers, emphasizing the need for greater inclusion, accessibility, and supportive gaming communities.
Closed captioning is a service displaying the speech-based audio and limited sound effects of digital media as text on screen, providing access to that content for audiences who are d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing (d/D/HoH), or in situational impairments such as viewing in a hospital waiting room with muted audio or a noisy bar with inaudible volume. Live captioning in fast-paced sports tends to have a faster presentation speed than most viewers can read. In this article, we introduce a new captioning style for live captioned sports, which only displays the colour commentary component of the speech-based audio, rather than the conventional captions for the play-by-play announcing with the colour commentary. This approach reduces the number of words compared to the conventional style. A study is designed to compare d/Deaf and HoH eye behaviour, preference, perceived quality satisfaction and comprehension from watching video clips of live broadcast fast sports with two captioning conditions to investigate behavioural patterns, correlations between quality factors and satisfaction and comprehension of d/D and HoH participants. The main findings revealed a difference between the two groups’ eye behaviour, preference, satisfaction and comprehension when watching different types of captioning.
In higher education, disabled students continue to face challenges in achieving a fully equitable and rewarding academic and social studentship experience, despite existing accessibility laws and the potential of technology to enhance access. In this case study, we explore the experiences of 12 disabled students with various disabilities through in-depth interviews to answer our research questions: (1) How do disabled students (not) use (assistive) technologies to navigate higher education and how does this affect their studentship experience specifically around accessibility? and (2) What are the implications for organizational, community-level, and individual technologies for empowering disabled students in higher education? Through reflexive thematic analysis of the students’ accounts, we present our findings under two main themes: (1) Breaking Down the Higher-Education Accessibility: Disabled Students and the Surrounding Ecosystem , and (2) Navigating the System and Own Resources: The Long Journey toward Accessibility . Later, we discuss our findings from the perspective of Empowerment Theory and show how empowerment in the higher education context may be understood at three different levels: organizational, community, and individual. Finally, we define “empowering technology” in the context of higher education accessibility and provide design considerations for empowering technology in higher education.
