Poster accepted to ASSETS 2012!

A poster that we submitted to the ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 2012) on our workshop has been accepted to the conference! Here is the abstract:

This paper describes a Science-Technology-Engineering-Mathematics (STEM) outreach workshop conducted with post-secondary students diagnosed with learning differences including Learning Disabilities (LD), Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorders (AD/HD), and/or Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). In this workshop, students were actively involved in participatory design exercises such as data gathering, identifying accessible design requirements, and evaluating mobile applications and games targeted for diverse users. This hands-on experience broadened students’ understanding of STEM areas, provided them with an opportunity to see themselves as computer scientists, and demonstrated how they might succeed in computing careers, especially in human-centered computing and interface design. Lessons learned from the workshop also offer useful insight on conducting participatory design with this unique population.

We are very excited to present the results of this ongoing collaboration at ASSETS in Boulder, CO, in October! We will post the final camera-ready 2-page paper and the final poster we develop when they are available.

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Flynn Wolf – Rehab Dashboard

Rehab Dashboard is an application created by Andrew Paquette and Doug League as part of Dr. Kuber’s Assistive Technology course at UMBC. The app was created in App Inventor, and makes use of the onboard gyroscopic measures in smartphones. These measures supply feedback in realtime on the angle of the phone in space. For this app, those measures are used to guide people performing a number of rehabilitative exercises, such as wrist and bicep curls.

  

Rehab Dashboard app screenshot of main menu

Patrick Carrington – Procedure Pal

The workshop at Landmark College was a unique experience for me.  The application I presented during the participatory design workshop was a procedural memory training application. It consisted of 4 screens: 1) to add new activities, 2) a menu to choose an activity to learn, 3) the activity viewer, and 4) a quiz to test the user’s knowledge of the procedure. The application was programmed using the Android OS and presented to the students using a Google Nexus One cell phone.

Kirk Norman – Scheduler

The trip to Landmark College this past semester was extremely beneficial to my studies, and hopefully to the students who were a part of the workshop. It was great to see a room of students who had given up a Saturday to be a part of a session like this.

Barbara Linam-Church – Med Quiz

I tested an application called Med Quiz created by Malvin Hiew and Chris Retz, for practicing medical vocabulary. We had two focus groups with the Landmark students, each with three students. The first group worked with the original application, while the second group looked at both the original application and the paper mockups done by the first group.

Med Quiz app prototype sketches