"It's an independent living skill, but covered with fun!": Prompting At-Home Skill Development for Children with Vision Impairment
Vinitha Gadiraju, Lucia Jayne, Shaun K. Kane · 2024 · Proceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3663548.3675626
Summary
This study investigates how to design tools that support independent living skill development for blind or visually impaired (BVI) children within their home environments. The research involved five families with BVI children in grades 4-6, using a three-phase methodology: initial interviews to understand family routines and skill-building strategies, a two-week diary study using customized activity journals with playful prompts and reflection questions, and follow-up interviews to assess the tool's effectiveness. The study is grounded in the Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC), a specialized curriculum for BVI children covering nine areas including compensatory skills, assistive technology, independent living skills, and social skills. While most existing technology for BVI children targets academics, spatial orientation, and physical mobility, this work uniquely focuses on the broader independent living skills that are best practiced in the home. The researchers designed personalized journal prompts for each family based on their specific developmental goals, incorporating motivators like favorite foods and music. Activities were designed to take 30 minutes or less, involve at least one parent, and directly address skills identified during interviews. The journals included both activity prompts and reflection questions to help parents track progress and adjust their approaches.
Key findings
The study revealed several key patterns across all five families. First, parents consistently tended to over-assist their children due to time constraints or concerns about task completion, and structured prompts explicitly encouraging parents to scale back assistance were effective in promoting independence — Family 2 was shocked to discover their daughter could dress herself in under two minutes when given the chance. Second, reflection proved to be a powerful component, helping parents shift from focusing on daily frustrations to appreciating overall progress and feeling validated in their approaches. Third, prompts that built on existing routines integrated easily and felt like fun bonding activities, while entirely new activities were harder to adopt. Fourth, the parent-teacher relationship was intimate and essential, with teachers providing skill lists and strategies that parents implemented at home, though parents also valued autonomy in setting culturally relevant goals like incorporating Spanish or religion. Fifth, children generally performed better at school than at home and preferred listening to teachers over parents. Families suggested a mobile application for ongoing prompting and reflection, with potential for AI-generated activity suggestions based on family-defined parameters.
Relevance
This research fills an important gap in accessibility technology design by addressing independent living skills for BVI children — an area largely overlooked in favor of academic and mobility tools. The findings have practical implications for designers of educational accessibility tools: home-use technology should target existing routines rather than introducing entirely new environments, and should explicitly prompt parents to reduce assistance levels. The study's approach of combining playful activity prompts with structured reflection offers a replicable framework for supporting developmental skill building across disability contexts. The emphasis on parent empowerment and private reflection space — separate from school judgment — highlights important considerations for family-centered assistive technology design. The paper also raises the potential for generative AI to scale personalized activity generation, reducing the labor-intensive process of customizing prompts for each family.
Tags: visual impairment · children · independent living skills · expanded core curriculum · parent-teacher collaboration · activity prompting · skill development · family
Standards referenced: Expanded Core Curriculum · IDEA