The Design Thinking framework has often been underexplored in its application to individuals with intellectual disabilities, requiring specific adaptations to enhance inclusivity and accessibility. This article explores the adaptation of the Design Thinking framework to better meet the needs of individuals with intellectual disabilities. Recognising that the framework is often underexplored for this group, the study proposes inclusive guidelines developed through a literature review and an explorative study involving 15 participants. Key focus areas include tailored communication, accessible supports, interdisciplinary collaboration, and ethical considerations. These guidelines were validated through a case study on modifying the Empathy Map tool, which showed improved empathy, engagement, and data accuracy. The findings highlight the framework’s potential for more inclusive design practices and offer practical insights to enhance accessibility in the design process for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

Cognitive impairments in text reading and understanding not only affect individuals with intellectual disabilities but also deaf and deaf-blind ones, the illiterate, and immigrants whose native language is different, among others. Technology to support accessibility to texts is required to help people to understand information. This article addresses an evaluation of the EASIER tool conducted with intellectual disabilities and older people for the identification of complex and unusual words in Spanish texts and proposes them simpler synonyms for the complex word detected. Fifty participants were recruited in collaboration with an organization that works with people with intellectual disabilities. The participants were divided into two groups: Group 1 represented 25 older people, and Group 2 represented 25 people with intellectual disabilities. The evaluation showed that, for complex word identification, the selected texts were more complex in content for people with intellectual disabilities than for older people, which consequently suggests that the proposal had a greater benefit for the intellectually disabled group. Related to the proposal of substitutes for complex words, there is a high number of substitutions accepted in participants with a high school level of education for Group 1 and primary level of education for Group 2. Additional multivariate analysis shows that the system is adequate for people of advanced age.

Governments have been investing considerable resources into making their services to citizens available through the Internet. However, people face barriers when accessing these e-services. Barriers affect people with disabilities to a greater extent. Taking into account the accessibility-in-use in addition to the required standards while designing these services would mitigate some of these issues. In this work, five e-services from the Spanish government were selected from among the most used ones and tested with fifteen participants, of whom ten participants belong to the group of people with low vision. Different qualitative and quantitative measures were analyzed to determine whether participants with low vision had more difficulties performing the tasks and to identify the design issues required to achieve improvement. The results highlighted some issues to be incorporated into the complexity and cognitive accessibility evaluations of e-services to anticipate difficulties (e.g., error prompting/prevention mechanisms). In addition, contributions to existing accessibility standards are proposed to be considered in the design of the e-services.

Difficulties in understanding texts that contain unusual words can create accessibility barriers for people with cognitive, language and learning disabilities. In this work, the EASIER system, a web system that provides various tools which improve cognitive accessibility, is presented. From a text in Spanish, complex words are detected and synonyms, a definition and a pictogram are offered for each complex word detected. Language and accessibility resources were used, such as easy-to-read dictionaries. The web system can be accessed from both desktop computers and mobile devices. Moreover, a browser extension is also offered.

Web accessibility evaluation requires tests to be carried out with real users with disabilities performing real tasks or activities. To recruit an appropriate group of users and to observe their performance in the real world is difficult. For this reason we have developed RemoTest, a platform that assists researchers designing experiments, conducting remote and in-situ experimental sessions and analyzing the data gathered while the users are accessing the Web. Although this tool is oriented to experimenters, it is necessary to check whether the evaluation environments created by RemoTest are accessible or not to the users that participate in the tests. To this end, we conducted formal in-situ evaluations with 36 users with diverse characteristics. For this assessment, the participants were asked to install the platform, to fill in some automatically created questionnaires and to carry out several web navigation tasks. From the data gathered we analyzed the ease of the installation process, the accessibility of the automatically generated questionnaires, and user satisfaction. The results revealed the suitability of the platform for conducting inclusive experiments both in remote and in-situ contexts and provided guidelines on how the experiments should be set out.

Nowadays, consumption of video content is extremely high and the corresponding technology must be accessible in order for people with disabilities to be able to access it. For this reason, the user agents or media players used to access video content must be accessible. This poster presents a checklist that includes indicators which can assist in the design and evaluation of accessible media players.

People with disabilities frequently use the Internet to perform a variety of common activities; however, they may often encounter aggravated accessibility barriers when using mobile devices to access the Web. In order to alleviate the problems faced by this group when using mobile devices, we have extended a previously developed transcoding-based system that adapts non-accessible web pages to the needs of specific users in order to enhance their accessibility. In this version, we included new adaptation techniques gathered from the literature in order to apply transcoding techniques to mobile devices. The enhanced system was evaluated with eight users with reduced mobility using tablets. The exploratory study suggests that alternative interaction methods such as the ones named ‘end tap’ and ‘steady tap’ are beneficial for some participants with reduced mobility, dexterity or strength in the upper limbs. Other results show that six of the eight users preferred the adapted version with enlarged interaction elements which required less physical effort, even if this adaptation increases the size of the page with the disadvantages associated with such a change.

Despite the myriad media content, there are users who cannot access it. Accessibility standards indicate that both the media content as the user agent that provides access to the media content must be accessible to everyone, with or without a disability. To address this issue, this work presents a Model-Based tool, which gives support to the development process of an accessible media player according to accessibility standards. Requirements and adaptation rules regarding the accessibility of a media player and video content are included in the tool design following a methodological approach. This authoring tool is a graphical editor which is aimed at being used by any professional without having a high level of expertise in accessibility.

APEINTA is a Spanish educational project founded by the Spanish Minister of Education and Sciences that aims for inclusive education for every student of all abilities in and out of the classroom. In this work, the APEINTA project is presented

This paper introduces a pilot experience in teaching database using accessible digital resources in 3er course of Computer Science degree at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. A platform containing learning material in different formats (video, audio, slides presentation) has been designed allowing students accessing resources as well as to be evaluated by means of tests. Preliminary results show that 46.81% of the students have already interacted with the system and 97.12% of the students passed the tests.

Among the technological solutions to achieve an inclusive education, the educative electronic accessible resources providing content adaptability is an alternative which reduces discrimination. It also favors the inclusion with right equalities which can be used by students regardless of their specific need and use contexts. Following this line of adaptability of contents on the web, a practical case [1] has been launched: an accessible interface of a multimedia resource with caption and audio description that offers the user the control over the decision of which sound and/or visual alternatives he wants to be introduced to. This resource has been designed with Universal Design criteria which are found in the Inclusive Design methodological framework.