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People with cognitive disabilities often use reminder applications on smartphones and tablets to complete everyday activities. However, these devices lack the capabilities to provide customized contextual prompts, essential to support individuals during their activities. As smart home devices, like voice assistants and “smart” appliances, become mainstream, they could support individuals with cognitive disabilities by presenting prompts and reminders in place. To understand how smart devices can expand their features to support customized prompts, we conducted remote participatory design interviews with adults with cognitive disabilities and their caregivers or parents. Participants described and designed multimodal interactive prompts to illustrate how an augmented reality-based smart display can motivate individuals to track progress and complete everyday activities. Designs included features, like avatar coaches, gameplay mechanics, and riveting animations. This paper provides novel prompting strategies and feedback techniques designed by participants and guidelines for making future smart devices more accessible. 

Not AvailablePeople with cognitive disabilities may experience challenges in consistently performing daily activities because they skip steps, struggle to track progress, or lack the motivation to complete them. These challenges are often along a range; people need assistive devices customized to their specific needs. However, existing assistive technologies, like prompting systems, lack the capabilities to customize support for diverse needs. With the advent of smart home devices, there are opportunities to design prompting systems that support diverse accessibility and motivational needs, thereby supporting the regular practice of daily activities. To understand design factors for such devices, we interviewed adults with cognitive disabilities, parents, and caregivers. Our participants described their needs for future prompting systems, including structuring tasks, supporting motivation, and introducing community support. This paper presents insights and design suggestions for context-aware assistive technologies that could help people with cognitive disabilities regularly perform everyday activities. 

Computer science education is widely viewed as a path to empowerment for young people, potentially leading to higher education, careers, and development of computational thinking skills. However, few resources exist for people with cognitive disabilities to learn computer science. In this paper, we document our observations of a successful program in which young adults with cognitive disabilities are trained in computing concepts. Through field observations and interviews, we identify instructional strategies used by this group, accessibility challenges encountered by this group, and how instructors and students leverage peer learning to support technical education. Our findings lead to guidelines for developing tools and curricula to support young adults with cognitive disabilities in learning computer science. 

Block-based programming languages can support novice programmers through features such as simplified code syntax and user-friendly libraries. However, most block-based programming languages are highly visual, which makes them inaccessible to blind and visually impaired students. To address the inaccessibility of block-based languages, we introduce StoryBlocks, a tangible block-based game that enables blind programmers to learn basic programming concepts by creating audio stories. In this paper, we document the design of StoryBlocks and report on a series of design activities with groups of teachers, Braille experts, and students. Participants in our design sessions worked together to create accessible stories, and their feedback offers insights for the future development of accessible, tangible programming tools. 

Introductory computer programming presents a number of challenges for blind and visually impaired screen reader users. In addition to the challenges of navigating complex code documents using a screen reader, novice programmers who are blind are often unable to experience fun coding projects such as programming games or animations. To address these accessibility barriers, we developed Bonk, an accessible programming environment that enables the creation of interactive audio games using a subset of the JavaScript programming language. Bonk enables novice programmers to create, share, play, and remix accessible audio games. In this paper, we introduce the Bonk programming toolkit and describe its use in a week-long programming workshop with blind and visually impaired high school students. Students in the workshop were able to create and share original audio games using Bonk, and expressed enthusiasm about furthering their programming knowledge.