Development and Evaluation of an Independently Usable Digital Story Telling App with Video Outputs for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities

There are a significant number of people in the U.S. whose literacy deficits significantly limit opportunities for written self-expression, including individuals with intellectual disabilities. While this population can offer revealing insights given their unique perspectives, self-expression often occurs in the dependent context of transcription by another person, or, perhaps too often, not at all. To address this issue, this project proposes to design, develop and test a universally designed digital story telling (DST) application designed to provide a format for independent self-expression and documentation. The system will provide system generated prompts to guide the user through a simplified process for recording, saving, organizing, retrieving, and distributing user-authored multimedia documents. Unlike the limited existing systems that provide proprietary outputs, the DST system output will be in the form of universally sharable video formats such as MPEG-4 (e.g., mp4) which is supported in iPad, Android and Windows environments. In Phase I we will determine the feasibility of the approach for providing a format to allow students with intellectual disabilities to independently create, save, and share a series of personal digital stories in comparison to one or more mainstream multimedia documentation systems.