Workplace Readiness Stories prepare young adults with visions impairment for employment

Project Summary: WRS – Workplace Readiness Stories Significance: Pre-adults and young adults (16 to 21 years old) with a vision impairment (VIs), need to build workplace readiness skills so they can obtain employment after high school. These skills are taught by counselors specially trained to work with VIs. There is the severe shortage of specialized counselors, resulting in most of these VIs not receiving sufficient training, and not achieving employment after high school. Solving this problem for people with a disability is now a priority for NIMHD and improving quality-of-life is part of NIMHD’s five- year strategic plan. Our prototype, entitled WRS, will assess the feasibility and satisfaction of using an Accessible Interactive Fiction (AIF) story to (1) enable the VIs to independently practice and improve these skills in a virtual non-threatening, safe environment, as they experience the outcomes of these skill decisions, and (2) empower counselors to use their limited time more effectively by monitoring the VI’s progress in a Dashboard and assisted by a Training Guide. With these tools, counselors can target areas of most need, discuss the result of the VI’s virtual experience, and explore the designed teachable moments. Empowering a counselor to use their time more effectively can result in that counselor helping more VIs. Research Questions: (1) To what extent do VIs find an Accessible Interactive Fiction story to be a usable and engaging system to practice and improve their Workplace Readiness skills? (2) To what extent do counselors find the Training Guide and Dashboard useful for helping VIs improve these skills? Prior Work: Our Phase I prototype, WRS, will be based on our innovative process that captures the knowledge and best practices from research scientists, practicing counselors, and individuals with the disability and encodes their experience into a human-computer interaction, known as an AIF story. We developed this process as part of a NIDILRR SBIR project which helped young high school students with a vision impairment get a summer job. WRS is an experiential learning platform for VIs to independently improve workplace readiness skills. Specific Aims (SA): In SA-1, working with an Expert Team of researchers and counselors, we define the specifications for the prototype AIF story. In SA-2, we create the prototype AIF story. In SA-3, we create the Training Guide and Dashboard for the counselors. In SA-4, we recruit VIs and their counselors to use the AIF story and assess the prototype’s usability and the VI’s engagement. In SA-2, working with the Expert Team and VIs, we create, and iteratively improve, the prototype AIF story. In SA-3, we create the Training Guide and Dashboard for counselors. In SA-4, we assess the prototype’s usability and engagement by recruiting VIs and their counselors to use the AIF story and then measure the VI’s rating of the story’s usability and engagement, and their counselor’s rating of the usefulness of the Training Guide and Dashboard. Future Directions: If deemed feasible, we will propose to continue to Phase II and create a full curriculum of AIF stories and evaluate its effectiveness of the stories through random control trials.