People rely on online information for important life tasks such as managing personal finances and understanding medical symptoms. However, due to its intrinsically language-focused nature, online search poses considerable difficulties for people with language impairments. Currently these difficulties are poorly understood. We report findings from an observation of the information search behavior of 12 people with aphasia. We identify a wide range of difficulties and strategies aimed at combating them, spanning the entire information search process. Findings include previously unreported difficulties and strategies that highlight the importance of designing search technologies to better support the complex needs of people who find language challenging, such as by facilitating word finding cueing strategies, error prevention and recovery, browsing, appropriation, text interpretation and and by decreasing reliance on language competency in general. This has the potential not only to benefit searchers with language impairments, but to make information search easier for all.

People with language impairments, such as aphasia, use a range of total communication strategies. These go beyond spoken language to include non-verbal utterances, props and gestures. The uptake of videoconferencing platforms necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic means that people with aphasia now use these communication strategies online. However, no data exists on the impact of videoconferencing on communication for this population. Working with an aphasia charity that moved its conversation support sessions online, we investigated the experience of communication via a videoconferencing platform. We report a study which investigated this through: 1) observations of online conversation support sessions; 2) interviews with speech and language therapists and volunteers; and 3) interviews with people with aphasia. Our findings reveal the unique and creative ways that the charity and its members with aphasia adapted their communication to videoconferencing. We unpack specific, novel challenges relating to total communication via videoconferencing and the related impacts on social and privacy issues.

Novel AI-infused educational technologies can give children with blindness the opportunity to explore concepts learned incidentally through vision by using alternative perceptual modalities. However, more effort is needed to support the meaningful use of such technological innovations for evaluations at scale and later wide-spread adoption. This paper presents the development and pilot evaluation of a curriculum to enable educators to support blind learners’ self-exploration of social attention using the PeopleLens technology. We reflect on these learnings to present four design guidelines for creating curricula aimed to enable meaningful use. We then consider how formulations of “success” by our participants can help us think about ways of assessing efficacy in low-incidence disability groups. We conclude by arguing for our community to widen the scope of discourse around assistive technologies from design and engineering to include supporting their meaningful use.