People with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) remain underrepresented in the co-design of technology, despite a growing emphasis on inclusive design within HCI. This scoping review synthesises knowledge on co-design methods by examining how people with ID and their support networks have been involved in technology design. A systematic search of four databases identified 25 relevant papers. Our analysis draws together the design methods and inclusion strategies used across these studies, highlighting practices, tools, and adaptations that accommodated diverse abilities, built trust, and supported agency. From this synthesis, we articulate how co-design practices have been tailored to promote inclusivity and propose principles and approaches to guide future research that centres ID perspectives. These findings provide researchers, designers, and practitioners with insights for fostering the equitable participation of people with ID in the design of technology.

Voice Assistants (VAs) are increasingly integrated into smartphones and smart home devices, offering potential support for diverse groups of users. However, limited research has examined how individuals with Intellectual Disabilities (ID) engage with these technologies. We conducted an eight week study with 17 adults with ID and four support workers at a disability support organization, integrating screen based VAs within a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics) program. Data were collected through interviews with participants and support workers before, during, and after deployment, complemented by analysis of VA interaction logs and researcher observations. Participants initiated 260 interactions with the VAs, using them for information retrieval, entertainment, and learning, with peer support playing a critical role in sustaining engagement. Some participants experienced difficulties with pronunciation and cognitive challenges, while several formed emotional connections with the devices. Based on these findings, we propose six design considerations to guide the development of more inclusive VAs.

Figure 1: TapeBlock making materials including components and conductive tape.A range of TapeBlocks types including lights, vibration, fan and switches.Creative TapeBlocks including vertical and a horizontal fur creatures and a flower garden, TapeBlock adaptions including conductive dots, magnetic connections and flat TapeBlocks.

Figure 1: Participants engaging with bodystorming scenarios to A) develop makerspace design ideas and B) evaluate the resources that support the C) delivery of a eMaking program of support to people with intellectual disabilities.

There is a growing availability of computational and electronic toolkits designed for learning and enrichment activities, however, these toolkits are often inaccessible for blind and low vision (BLV) users. We co-designed with BLV participants, several types of adaption and augmentations that can increase the accessibility of a previously developed electronic toolkit. We explored NFC-enabled 3D-printed circuit templates, braided connectors, and other tactile adaptions developed from co-design sessions with BLV users. We evaluated the resulting toolkit with nine blind and low-vision participants and found that they experimentally and tactually learned to compose circuits of increasing complexity. A key design aspect was incorporating redundant methods that enabled participants to exercise their personal modality preferences when identifying components and making connections. Through our work, we highlight how digital fabrication can be applied to adapt modular electronic toolkits to increase the availability of existing electronics learning platforms for the BLV population.

Recent combinations of interactive technology, humans, and water have resulted in “WaterHCI”. WaterHCI design seeks to complement the many benefits of engagement with the aquatic domain, by offering, for example, augmented reality systems for snorkelers, virtual reality in floatation tanks, underwater musical instruments for artists, robotic systems for divers, and wearables for swimmers. We conducted a workshop in which WaterHCI experts articulated the field's grand challenges, aiming to contribute towards a systematic WaterHCI research agenda and ultimately advance the field.

With their overwhelming reliance on visual arts and artefacts, art galleries and museums are often considered unapproachable spaces for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). We present the results of an ongoing collaboration with an Australian regional gallery in their efforts to improve access by BLV people to their permanent collection and temporary exhibitions. We describe the approach taken to develop interpretive technology-mediated experiences for BLV visitors for their 2021 and 2022 flagship exhibitions, along with evaluation from the perspectives of both BLV visitors and the gallery staff. Outcomes include: broader awareness within the gallery for inclusive design practice and public engagement; better understandings of the needs of BLV visitors, in particular relating to confidence building and technology integration; understanding of gallery constraints and challenges; and a framework for the development of future inclusive gallery experiences.

We present the results of one year spent engaging people living with intellectual disabilities with an electronics and programming package. The program was run in collaboration with a disability support organization and delivered by support workers. We evaluate key qualities of the package at three sites via ongoing communication and reflective interviews with five support workers, along with observation of sessions and contextual inquiry with eleven people with a range of disabilities. Our findings demonstrate the importance of physicality in enabling experiences by creating real-world analogues and supporting diverse group interactions; how groups support members’ attention, motivating each other, and allow space for coping mechanisms; and participants’ growing confidence and creativity in problem solving, and the emergence of self-directed activities. We discuss the importance of diverse repetition for skill development, how skills develop over the year, and pragmatic lessons for conducting a long-term research program with a disability support organization.

People with intellectual disabilities often experience inequalities that affect the standard of their everyday lives. Assistive technologies can help alleviate some of these inequalities, yet abandonment rates remain high. This is in part due to a lack of involvement of all stakeholders in their design and evaluation, thus resulting in outputs that do not meet this cohort’s complex and heterogeneous needs. The aim of this half-day workshop is to focus on community building in a field that is relatively thin and disjointed, thereby enabling researchers to share experiences on how to design for and with people with intellectual disabilities, provide internal support, and establish new collaborations. Workshop outcomes will help to fill a gap in the available guidelines on how to include people with intellectual disabilities in research, through more accessible protocols as well as personalised and better fit-for-purpose technologies.

People who are blind rely on touch and hearing to understand the world around them, however it is extremely difficult to understand movement through these modes. The advent of refreshable tactile displays (RTDs) offers the potential for blind people to access tactile animations for the very first time. A survey of touch readers and vision accessibility experts revealed a high level of enthusiasm for tactile animations, particularly those relating to education, mapping and concept development. Based on these suggestions, a range of tactile animations were developed and four were presented to 12 touch readers. The RTD held advantages over traditional tactile graphics for conveying movement, depth and height, however there were trade-offs in terms of resolution and textural properties. This work offers a first glimpse into how refreshable tactile displays can best be utilised to convey animated graphics for people who are blind.

In recognition of food's significant experiential pleasures, culinary practitioners and designers are increasingly exploring novel combinations of computing technologies and food. However, despite much creative endeavors, proposals and prototypes have so far largely maintained a traditional divide, treating food and technology as separate entities. In contrast, we present a “Research through Design” exploration of the notion of food as computational artifact: wherein food itself is the material of computation. We describe the Logic Bonbon, a dessert that can hydrodynamically regulate its flavor via a fluidic logic system. Through a study of experiencing the Logic Bonbon and reflection on our design practice, we offer a provisional account of how food as computational artifact can mediate new interactions through a novel approach to food-computation integration, that promotes an enriched future of Human-Food Interaction.

Engagement with electronic toolkits enhances people’s creative abilities, self-esteem, problem-solving skills and enables the creation of personally meaningful artifacts. A variety of simplified electronics toolkits are increasingly available to help different user groups engage with technology. However, they are often inaccessible for people with intellectual disabilities (IDs), who experience a range of cognitive and physical impairments. We designed and developed TronicBoards, a curated set of accessible electronic modules, to address this gap. We evaluated it one-on-one with 10 participants using a guided exploration approach. Our analysis revealed that participants were able to create simple sensor-based interactive circuits with varying levels of assistance. We report the strengths and weaknesses of TronicBoards, considering participants’ successes and challenges in manipulating and comprehending toolkit components, circuit building activities, and troubleshooting processes. We discuss implications for designing inclusive electronics toolkits for people with IDs, particularly in considering design elements that improve functionality, comprehensibility and agency.

Recently, interest has grown in the assessment of anxiety that leverages human physiological and behavioral data to address the drawbacks of current subjective clinical assessments. Complex experiences of anxiety vary on multiple characteristics, including triggers, responses, duration and severity, and impact differently on the risk of anxiety disorders. This article reviews the past decade of studies that objectively analyzed various anxiety characteristics related to five common anxiety disorders in adults utilizing features of cardiac, electrodermal, blood pressure, respiratory, vocal, posture, movement, and eye metrics. Its originality lies in the synthesis and interpretation of consistently discovered heterogeneous predictors of anxiety and multimodal-multisensor analytics based on them. We reveal that few anxiety characteristics have been evaluated using multimodal-multisensor metrics, and many of the identified predictive features are confounded. As such, objective anxiety assessments are not yet complete or precise. That said, few multimodal-multisensor systems evaluated indicate an approximately 11.73% performance gain compared to unimodal systems, highlighting a promising powerful tool. We suggest six high-priority future directions to address the current gaps and limitations in infrastructure, basic knowledge, and application areas. Action in these directions will expedite the discovery of rich, accurate, continuous, and objective assessments and their use in impactful end-user applications.

The accessibility and affordability of tangible electronic toolkits are significant barriers to their uptake by people with disabilities. We present the design and evaluation of TapeBlocks, a low-cost, low-fidelity toolkit intended to be accessible for people with intellectual disabilities while promoting creativity and engagement. We evaluated TapeBlocks by interviewing makers, special educational needs teachers and support coaches. Analysis of these interviews informed the design of a series of maker workshops using TapeBlocks with young adults living with intellectual disabilities, led by support coaches with support from the research team. Participants were able to engage with TapeBlocks and making, eventually building their own TapeBlocks to make personal creations. Our evaluation reveals how TapeBlocks supports accessible making and playful discovery of electronics for people living with disabilities, and addresses a gap in existing toolkits by being tinkerable, affordable and having a low threshold for engagement.

Vicious cycles of anxiety responses underlie the onset of increasingly prevalent and highly impairing anxiety disorders and also contribute to their maintenance. Our goal is to evaluate whether different anxiety responses are evident in temporal patterns of physiological and behavioral features. Consequently, we established a rich multimodal-multisensor dataset of cardiac, electrodermal, movement, posture, and speech measures from 95 young adults during two anxiety experiments that induce social anxiety and bug-phobic anxiety. A subset of this dataset is publicly available at “Anxiety Phases Dataset” Figshare repository. We adopted a generalized mixed model approach and found that 10 out of 14 feature trajectories modeled for high- and low-anxiety groups differ significantly at 0.001 level in magnitude, creating at least two temporal phases in both groups. Further differences in magnitude, duration and the number of phases were observed for responses of confrontation, safety behaviors, escape, and avoidance in the high-anxiety group. Our findings contribute to the long-term aim of designing multimodal systems that have great potential to reduce the impacts of anxiety disorders and improve therapy.

A plethora of assistive technologies are designed to cater to relatively common types of disabilities. However, some people have disabilities or circumstances that fall outside these pluralities, requiring a bespoke assistive technology to be developed and custom built to meet their unique requirements. To explore the opportunities and challenges of such an endeavor, we document the process undertaken to build a braille keyboard for a one-handed blind person over the course of 18-months. This process involved iterative prototyping within an intensive co-creation process, due to the unique needs arising from having two intersecting impairments and the challenges of effectively developing an entirely new format of AAT. Through a structured reflection on this process, we provide an account of the practical, pragmatic and ethical considerations that apply when developing a bespoke assistive technology, whilst illustrating the wider value of bespoke assistive technology development for a more general community of people with disabilities.

When learning sign language, feedback on accuracy is critical to vocabulary acquisition. When designing technologies to provide such visual feedback, we need to research effective ways to identify errors and present meaningful and effective feedback to learners. Motion capture technologies provide new opportunities to enhance sign language learning experiences through the presentation of visual feedback that indicates the accuracy of the signs made by learners. We designed, developed, and evaluated an embodied agent-based system for learning the location and gross motor movements of sign language vocabulary. The system presents a sign, tracks the learner's attempts at a sign, and provides visual feedback to the learner on their errors. We compared five different types of visual feedback, and in a study involving 51 participants we established that learners preferred visual feedback where their attempts at a sign were shown concurrently with the movements of the instructor with or without explicit corrections.

The first step to literacy is engagement with books and the printed word. This is even more important for children who are blind or have severe low vision, as active touch is required for exposure to meaning through tactile books. ETextiles offer an affordable and innovative method for enhancing tactile book pages with sensory inputs and interaction to encourage engagement. We explored the training requirements for people to incorporate eTextiles into tactile story books, even without prior experience or skills. Through the process of creating sample materials and training adults and children at public workshops, we developed a set of guiding principles for facilitating workshops on creating tactile story books with eTextiles to encourage tactile engagement in children with vision impairments.

This demonstration illustrates the importance of the layout of a keyboard to using braille, which is highly dependent on its spatial arrangement. The design and layout of a keyboard for entering braille changes the mental effort required to transform the dots prior to inputting the braille cells. The design of two keyboards that can be used for entering braille onto an electronic device are contrasted for the demonstration. Keyboard 1 has the dots on the top and Keyboard 2 has the dots underneath. Each has inherent advantages and disadvantages.