Able To Include: Focus groups with persons with IDD and their coaches communicating through social media

Abstract

The CIP-project Able To Include (ATI) is run by partners from five European countries. The aim is to create a technical solution thus ensuring that people with intellectual disabilities can use applications to lead fulfilling, independent lives. ATI is developing an accessibility layer that will integrate with existent and future ICT tools. The integration of this accessibility layer will be tested in 3 different pilots in Spain, Belgium and UK, and in 3 different usage scenarios: leisure within the information society, mobility and labor integration. To optimize the design, ATI chooses a collaborative approach with the end-users, i.e. people with IDD. To achieve this, focus groups were set up with people with IDD and with caregivers of people with IDD. The main purpose of this research was to explore the experiences and the current knowledge of people with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities (IDD) regarding social media. This paper mainly focuses on the technological results of the focus groups held in Belgium. Researchers found that people with IDD have a great interest in social media. It holds a lot of possibilities, yet people with IDD also encounter several issues, either with the devices being used, or coming from the application itself. As communicating through social media seems to be a critical issue, the tools developed by ATI can be of great value. A human centered design, including the end-users by the means of focus groups, enables researches to produce customized designing solutions, taking into account the needs and the specific context of use for people with IDD.

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