Digital Storyteller: A Cognitively Accessible Literary Compositioning Tool

Students and adults with intellectual and other cognitive disabilities have a critical need for accessible technologies that can enable them to speak for themselves in all arenas of life, including academic settings, vocational settings, for leisure activities and for therapeutic purposes. There are, however, a significant number of people in the U.S. whose literacy deficits effectively prohibit opportunities for written self expression, including millions with cognitive disabilities. In this project we will design, develop and evaluate a universally designed multimedia compositioning tool, called Digital Storyteller (DST). In Phase I a limited prototype of DST was developed and evaluated in a pilot study with 17 study participants with intellectual disabilities. The results of the Phase I project demonstrated the technical merit and feasibility of the DST approach for providing a platform for individuals with intellectual disabilities to more independently create multimedia compositions when compared to two leading mainstream compositing tools. In Phase II we will expand the system to develop and test specialized modules of the system that will be optimized for specific outputs, such as Book Report, Short Answer, Essay, Activity Reporting, Therapy Journal, Diary Keeping, Web Log, Storytelling or Memoir modules, and evaluate the usability and efficacy of the system for increasing literary output.