Children’s audio players have received scarce attention compared to their video counterparts, despite studies showing audio is often used daily for education and entertainment. We develop a design space rooted in the history of audio players for children and scholarly research on interaction design and audio for children. We use this design space to define and describe commercially available connected audio players for children, as well as outline avenues for further design research.

In this half-day workshop, we will explore how to co-design technology in inclusive classrooms where children have diverse sensory, motor, cognitive or behavioral abilities. We will discuss barriers and opportunities in co-designing for inclusion, exploring techniques and tools to support learning in a collaborative environment. We encourage researchers, educators, parents, and other stakeholders to participate and provide their expertise and know-how in improving these environments, with an aim to support both inclusion and collaboration; and children’s exploration of their own interests and approaches to learning. We seek to better understand research experiences in these environments, co-design techniques that were successfully used, and what they can teach the broader field of interaction design for children.

Interactional synchrony, the spontaneous coordination of movements during interaction, is increasingly considered important in research on the development of non-verbal communication by autistic children. There is evidence that interventions using embodied-interaction technologies to support interactional synchrony are possible, but we do not have a shared framework in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) for designing and evaluating such systems. We discuss existing measurement and evaluation tools used in experimental psychology and consider how the prevalent approach could be adapted to naturalistic HCI study contexts, with input from domain experts. We report on an exploratory case study evaluating a full-body interactive musical system with a group of ten autistic children. We provide methodological recommendations for the evaluation of future systems focusing on interactional synchrony, highlight limitations of current measurement tools and suggest mitigations.

Disability professionals could use digital fabrication tools to provide customised assistive technologies or accessible media beneficial to the education of Blind or visually impaired youth. However, there is little documentation of long-term practices with these tools by professionals in this field, limiting our ability to support their work. We report on such practices in a French organisation, providing disability educational services and using digital fabrication since 2013, for six years. We trace how professionals defined how digital fabrication could and should be used through a range of projects, based on pedagogical uses and the constraints in creation, production and maintenance. We outline new research perspectives going beyond 3D printers and its promises of automation to embrace hybrid approaches currently supported by laser cutters, the learning and documentation process, and the production of accessible tactile media at a regional or national scale.

Design research methods are increasingly used as ready-made recipes for success in a variety of fields and multidisciplinary teams. Yet as any tools, they shape the gaze, attitudes, and behaviors of designers. Moreover their generic nature tends to obscure the specific situations in which they were created. In reaction, grounding our work in adversarial design, we propose four tricky probes: believable design tools, which appear to be innocuous, but progressively engage designers in crossing boundaries of what should be acceptable. This is done by slowly derailing design research activities, leading to trigger reflection on the part of designers on their beliefs, practice, and the tools they use. Our probes raise issues at the intersection of design research and gender in urban service design, such as the use of pre-made algorithms to understand gendered patterns in urban movements.

Addressing the needs of visually impaired people is of continued interest in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Yet, one of the major challenges facing researchers in this field continues to be how to design adequate quantitative empirical evaluation for these users in HCI. In this paper, we analyse a corpus of 178 papers on technologies designed for people with visual impairments, published since 1988, and including at least one quantitative empirical evaluation (243 evaluations in total). To inform future research in this area, we provide an overview, historic trends and a unified terminology to design and report quantitative empirical evaluations. We identify open issues and propose a set of guidelines to address them. Our analysis aims to facilitate and stimulate future research on this topic.

Assistance dogs are a key intervention to support the autonomy of people with tetraplegia. Previous research on assistive technologies have investigated ways to, ultimately, replace their labour using technology, for instance through the design of smart home environments. However, both the disability studies literature and our interviews suggest there is an immediate need to support these relationships, both in terms of training and bonding. Through a case study of an accessible dog treats dispenser, we investigate a technological intervention responding to these needs, detailing an appropriate design methodology and contributing insights into user requirements and preferences.

This paper argues for designing geo-technologies supporting non-visual sensory knowledge. Sensory knowledge refers to the implicit and explicit knowledge guiding our uses of our senses to understand the world. To support our argument, we build on an 18 months field-study on geography classes for primary school children with visual impairments. Our findings show (1) a paradox in the use of non-visual sensory knowledge: described as fundamental to the geography curriculum, it is mostly kept out of school; (2) that accessible geo-technologies in the literature mainly focus on substituting vision with another modality, rather than enabling teachers to build on children's experiences; (3) the importance of the hearing sense in learning about space. We then introduce a probe, a wrist-worn device enabling children to record audio cues during field-trips. By giving importance to children's hearing skills, it modified existing practices and actors' opinions on non-visual sensory knowledge. We conclude by reflecting on design implications, and the role of technologies in valuing diverse ways of understanding the world.

In this paper, we describe the co-design process leading to the implementation of an open source software enabling M., a person living severe motor, dexterity and speech impairments, to play music, either alone or with others. We first conducted participant observations in the nursing home she lives in. We then used regular iterations to facilitate communication and to enable her to participate to the design process. We outline how such design process can reinforce participation in different areas and contribute to the research on empowering adapted technologies.

We report on the design process leading to the creation of MapSense, a multi-sensory interactive map for visually impaired children. We conducted a formative study in a specialized institute to understand children's educational needs, their context of care and their preferences regarding interactive technologies. The findings (1) outline the needs for tools and methods to help children to acquire spatial skills and (2) provide four design guidelines for educational assistive technologies. Based on these findings and an iterative process, we designed and deployed MapSense in the institute during two days. It enables collaborations between children with a broad range of impairments, proposes reflective and ludic scenarios and allows caretakers to customize it as they wish. A field experiment reveals that both children and caretakers considered the system successful and empowering.