Middle School Social Stories to improve social skills for students who are blind or have low vision.

The goals of this project are (1) to use an Accessible Interactive Fiction (AIF) story to improve the social skills for an underserved population, specifically middle school students with a vision impairment (VI), and to provide information to their instructor (parent or teacher) to deliver targeted instruction in areas of most need. The objectives include: (1) for each of the five stories, define the requirements of an AIF story that enable students to practice key social skills, using any computer/mobile device with a web browser; (2) create the five stories based on Objective 1; (3) build a web service to capture the student’s progress; and (4) measure the acceptability and usefulness of MSS with actual middle school students who represent a cross-section of the underserved population, to improve the student’s social skills and to help the instructor deliver more targeted instruction. Anticipated outcomes are the student’s mastery of social skills and an instructor’s ability to deliver more targeted instruction in face-to-face provisioning of habilitation. The expected product is a system that middle school VI students will use under instructor guidance, to help these students survive and thrive in school, by improving their social skills which will result in more of these students graduating high school and finding increased access to job opportunities, increased earning potential, economic stability, and personal growth.