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Employment of autistic individuals is strikingly low in relation to the skill level and capabilities of this population. Roughly 65% of autistic adults are either unemployed or underemployed relative to their abilities but there is increasing recognition that this number could be greatly improved through empowering autistic individuals while simultaneously providing a boost to the economy. Much of this disparity can be attributed in part to the lack of awareness and understanding among employers regarding behavior of autistic individuals during the hiring process. Most notably, the job interview—where strong eye contact is traditionally expected but can be extremely uncomfortable for autistic individuals—presents an unreasonable initial barrier to employment for many. The current work presents a data visualization dashboard that is populated with quantitative data (including eye tracking data) captured during simulated job interviews using a novel interview simulator called Career Interview Readiness in Virtual Reality (CIRVR). We conducted a brief series of case studies wherein autistic individuals who took part in a CIRVR interview and other key stakeholders provided lived experiences and qualitative insights into the most effective design and application of such data visualization dashboard. We conclude with a discussion of the role of information related to visual attention in job interviews with an emphasis on the importance of descriptive rather than prescriptive interpretation. 

The employment settings for autistic individuals in the USA is grim. As more children are diagnosed with ASD, the number of adolescent and young adult with ASD will increase as well over the next decade. Based on reports, one of the main challenges in securing and retaining employment for individual with ASD is difficulty in communicating and working with others in workplace settings. Most vocational trainings focused on technical skills development and very few addresses teamwork skills development. In this study, we present the design of a collaborative virtual environment (CVE) that support autistic individual to develop their teamwork skills by working together with a partner in a shared virtual space. This paper described the CVE architecture, teamwork-based tasks design and quantitative measures to evaluate teamwork skills. A system validation was also carried out to validate the system design. The results showed that our CVE was able to support multiple users in the same shared environment, the tasks were tolerable by users, and all the quantitative measures are recorded accordingly.