Middle School Soft Skill Stories to Help Middle School Blind/Low-Vision Students Improve Their Soft Skills

The goal of this Phase I SBIR project is (1) to determine the feasibility of using an Accessible Interactive Fiction (AIF) story to help middle school (grades 7-9) students who are blind or have low vision (BLV) to practice and improve their soft-skills, and (2) to provide information to their teacher to deliver more targeted instruction thereby using instructional time more efficiently. AIF is a computer-based “choose-your-own-adventure” story, where the student is presented with hundreds of “decision points”, and the story plot proceeds based on the student’s choice, so they can experience the outcome of their decisions in a safe, non-judgmental, virtual environment. Project objectives include: (1) defining the requirements for a system that enables a BLV middle school student to practice and improve soft skills, (2) developing a prototype computer-based AIF story, (3) building a prototype web service to capture the student’s progress and display it as skill charts in a browser for the teacher, and (4) assessing acceptability and usefulness of the system to improve soft skills with actual BLV middle school students who represent a cross-section of the underserved population. The result is a system that students use under teacher guidance, to help the student improve soft skills, which have been shown to improve education and employment outcomes for BLV students.