Disengagement from games is challenging for children, and can lead to family conflict. While parental mediation is well-understood, the role of game design in supporting children’s disengagement remains underexplored. Our work addresses this gap through a qualitative study with 39 participants (22 children aged 4-11 and 17 parents), in which children played "Snarky’s Adventure", a prototype featuring disengagement-friendly mechanics supporting player understanding of progress, and the experience of satisfaction and closure at the end of play. Through Qualitative Content Analysis, we show that the features help children anticipate the end of play, but in some cases spark curiosity and the desire to re-engage. Additionally, while parents valued the mechanics to understand game progress, future work should explore how to actively engage them in children’s disengagement. Our work provides the first empirical exploration of disengagement-friendly game mechanics, and outlines challenges and opportunities for their future integration in children’s games.

Disengagement from games can be challenging for players, and various attempts have been made to provide parents with the tools to limit children’s playing time. However, little is known about how children experience disengagement, and how children and parents jointly navigate the process of exiting a play session. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, including 13 children (ages 4–9) and 12 parents. Through Thematic Analysis, we show that children – like adults – struggle to exit play if they have not yet reached a point of closure and are unsatisfied with their experience. At the same time, parents experience frustration when establishing limits, and many found it difficult to account for the state of a play session. On this basis, we highlight the relevance of disengagement-friendly game design and mediation strategies, and provide recommendations for children’s disengagement from play sessions while protecting their player experience.

Games for physical therapy can motivate patients, and HCI research has provided various recommendations for their design. However, such recommendations often remain at a high level: They are rarely reviewed with patients or appraised through application to game design and analysis. We address this gap by refining and operationalizing existing lessons for therapeutic games for young people. First, we report on semi-structured interviews with young people (aged 7–16) and parents, reviewing the lessons. Second, we operationalize them using an established collection of game design patterns to provide concrete guidance for game design and analysis. We critically appraise our approach through application to two games for physical therapy, Liberi and Wii Fit. Results show that high-level design implications can be made actionable using existing game design patterns, and we contribute a practical approach for the analysis and design of games for physical therapy.

In this experience report, we report on the first author’s recent personal experience of relocation from Turkey to Germany as a postdoctoral researcher with a mobility disability. Here, we outline the details of the relocation process in three phases. In each phase, we share reflections on the relocation experience specifically outlining accessibility challenges. We focus on customizing existing and new access needs, dealing with language barriers as a blocker for interpersonal accessibility, but also discuss digital access, and visibility of access information in relation to connecting with local disabled communities. We refine our insights into lessons learnt from this process, outlining implications for policy makers, researchers and designers, academic community, as well as for the disabled community. Through this autoethnographic experience report, we aim to open a space to critically rethink accessibility on the move and the role of technology, specifically in the context of relocation.

Fabrice Y Harel-Canada, Hanyu Zhou, Sreya Muppalla, Zeynep Senahan Yildiz, Miryung Kim, Amit Sahai, Nanyun Peng. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

A growing body of literature on mixed-ability teams within HCI investigates how disabled and non-disabled people collaborate. Still, how different disabilities can interact in a mixed-ability team is underexplored, especially for long commitments and in non-western contexts. As an emerging perspective in accessibility studies in HCI, disability justice emphasizes the importance of cross-disability collaborations. Collaborative access, interdependence, and cross-disability dialogue are keys to building accessible mixed-ability interactions. We conducted ten in-depth interviews with the members of a unique mixed-ability team (which includes people with different physical disabilities) using the same workspace with cross-disability interactions in Turkey. We aim to understand the requirements for an accessible mixed-ability virtual workspace and to identify practical design considerations for cross-disability solidarity-oriented virtual collaboration tools. To ensure equal access in virtual workspaces, we suggest implications for centering collective access, balancing external power dynamics, and supporting language and cultural diversities.

Positioning disabled people as deficient, dysfunctional, and locating the ’problem’ of disability within the individual, the over-medicalized, individualistic, and not equity-oriented perspectives of disability have led to oppression, discrimination, and exclusion of disabled people from important parts of public life. The global politics of disability rights and disability movements have brought thorny questions regarding the nature of dominant explanations. Equity-oriented perspectives and collaborative approaches regarding organization and distribution of access started to gain visibility. HCI research has a vital potential to contribute to this by providing related tools and technologies for integrating equal access in the collaborative organization of access. Considering the existing literature, the question of how access is collaboratively organized, negotiated, distributed and scaled through socio-technical mechanisms especially at an institutional level, as well as how mixed-ability groups reorganize access by interacting with institutional socio-technical structures remains open. In this research, I aim to extend the body of literature in collaborative access by presenting the importance of socio-technical perspectives for designing collaborative technologies to support equal distribution of access. My research is about the significance of equity perspectives in access and interaction. Specifically, this research focuses on understanding the role of socio-technical infrastructures for the organization and distribution of access by mixed-ability collaborators and developing design insights for socio-technical mechanisms to support equal distribution of access for people with disabilities.

Autism is a complex, life-long condition that manifests itself in unique ways in each person. Due to the complexity of the condition along with not having efficient and immediate social support, parents with autistic children often seek for and rely upon the information generated by the community (parents, caregivers, autistics and experts) on online platforms. We look into what parents of autistic individuals discuss on an online platform in Turkey, how they practice autism online and why those practices are important or relevant. Our findings show how parents cope with understanding and defining autism, and how they seek for empowering each other, and managing the everyday collectively under a dominant medical discourse around autism in Turkish context. Based on our findings, we extend the existing knowledge on collective and alternative ways of re-defining autism as lived experience and introduce recommendations on how those strategies can be integrated to design.