Kirana: A Gesture-based Market App for Life Skills Learning for Individuals with Developmental Disabilities
Sumita Sharma, Saurabh Srivastava, Krishnaveni Achary, Blessin Varkey, Tomi Heimonen, Jaakko Hakulinen, Markku Turunen, Nitendra Rajput · 2016 · Proceedings of the 18th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '16) · doi:10.1145/2982142.2982149
Summary
This demonstration paper presents Kirana, a gesture-based application that simulates the experience of purchasing items at a local Indian grocery store ("kirana") for individuals with developmental disabilities. The application was developed in collaboration with special educators, parents, and teachers at the Nai Disha Tamana School in New Delhi, India. Individuals with developmental disabilities face challenges in learning life skills that promote self-efficacy, including threats of being mistreated or misunderstood outside home or school, and difficulty arranging safe practice opportunities for real-world tasks. Purchasing items at a store involves multiple complex subtasks — deciding what to buy (decision making), calculating costs and balance (mathematical skills), and interacting with the shopkeeper (social interaction) — that can overwhelm individuals with developmental disabilities. Kirana breaks this complex task into smaller, configurable, achievable subtasks within a safe, self-paced virtual environment. The interface simulates a realistic kirana store layout with two shelves of items, a counter with cash register, a wallet showing available money, and a bill display. Teachers or care givers can customize tasks by configuring item types, prices, and total budget, and can increase complexity progressively. The application deliberately omits a shopkeeper avatar to allow mediators to incorporate personalized social interactions and to reduce simulation complexity. Interaction uses pointing gestures to select items, designed to promote socially acceptable behaviors that transfer to real-world store visits.
Key findings
This is a short demonstration paper that primarily describes the system design and its rationale rather than presenting formal evaluation results. The application was evaluated with participants from the Nai Disha Tamana School in New Delhi. The key design decisions reflect careful attention to cultural context and the specific needs of the Indian developmental disability community: the kirana store format was chosen because these small neighborhood shops are the primary retail experience in India, where customers stand outside and point to items they want; gesture-based interaction was selected because previous research established its potential for enhancing social, motor, and cognitive skills in this population; and the configurable task elements allow teachers to create individualized learning goals with progressive complexity. The research addresses an underexplored area — translating learnings from gesture-based virtual applications to real-world scenarios — by grounding the virtual environment in a specific, culturally authentic real-world context rather than creating an abstract learning exercise.
Relevance
Kirana addresses the intersection of developmental disability, digital learning, and Global South accessibility — a combination that is significantly underrepresented in accessibility research. For practitioners, it demonstrates the importance of cultural contextualization in assistive technology: a generic "store simulation" would not prepare someone for the specific interaction patterns of an Indian kirana shop, where the physical layout, social norms, and transaction process differ substantially from Western retail environments. The collaborative design approach with the Tamana School ensures the application meets actual educational needs rather than researcher assumptions. The focus on transferable real-world skills — rather than abstract cognitive exercises — aligns with growing recognition that technology for people with developmental disabilities should support practical independence. The configurable complexity is a notable design pattern: allowing educators to adjust item types, prices, and budgets means the same application can serve learners at very different skill levels, reducing the need for multiple specialized tools.
Tags: developmental disability · gesture interaction · educational technology · cognitive accessibility · independent living · global accessibility · Global South accessibility · self-efficacy