Development and Evaluation of a Cognitively Accessible App to Facilitate Social Networking for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities

The social isolation issues of individuals with intellectual disabilities are well documented in the literature. New social networking technologies have served to provide a popular format for increasing human socialization opportunities world wide. Challenges to independent access to social networking sites for individuals with intellectual disabilities include excessively featured, cluttered interfaces and primarily text-based interfaces. Facebook, with over 1.11 billion current users, is among the most popular social networking sites. While entities such as the American Federation for the Blind have begun making inroads to improving the accessibility of Facebook for citizens with visual impairments, no such effort has been undertaken for students and adults with intellectual disabilities. This project proposes development and evaluation of a software interface into Facebook for user on mobile devices that is independently usable by individuals with intellectual disabilities, including those with limited or no literacy skills. This App will provide a multimedia (e.g., voice recording, icons, text to speech) interface, a customizable filtering tool to limit screen features, and computer-generated prompts to guide the user using Facebook’s Software Development Kit (SDK) and open development opportunities. It will culminate in a feasibility study to determine if the simplified multimedia interface approach can significantly increase independent access to the most commonly used Facebook features for students and adults with intellectual disabilities.