AphasiaWeb: A Social Network for Individuals with Aphasia
Hannah Miller, Heather Buhr, Chris Johnson, Jerry Hoepner · 2013 · Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/2513383.2513439
Summary
This paper presents AphasiaWeb, a social network designed specifically for individuals with aphasia, an acquired language disorder typically resulting from stroke or head injury that impairs speaking, writing, and language comprehension. The authors argue that mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter are unusable for people with aphasia due to their chronological organization, crowded layouts, abundant feature sets, and non-intuitive terminology. Since maintaining social connections is a primary strategy for managing aphasia, the researchers developed a purpose-built alternative. AphasiaWeb was designed using a participatory action model involving four individuals with aphasia across pre-design and mid-design interviews. Key design decisions included topical rather than chronological content organization using a web-like circular layout (which research shows people with aphasia prefer), a guided question-and-answer navigation model inspired by the therapeutic "written choice" technique, multiple input modes (text, photos, and speech-to-text), content highlighting to draw attention to new activity, and categories for organizing posts across personal and community areas. The app was built for iPad using JQuery Mobile and Apache Cordova, targeting the third-generation iPad for its speech recognition capabilities. A two-month trial was conducted with seven participants from two regional aphasia support groups.
Key findings
During the two-month trial, participants added 64 posts and 237 comments, demonstrating sustained engagement with the platform. Commenting was far more frequent than posting, suggesting participants were more willing to join existing conversations than start new ones — an important design insight for aphasia-friendly communication tools. Picture posts generated more comments on average (3.5) than text posts (2.5), and individual preferences for text versus photo posting varied widely, validating the importance of supporting multiple input modes. The most popular personal categories were Family and Friends, Miscellaneous, and Pets, while Questions and Events were most used in the Community Area. Qualitative feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with participants comparing the experience to their aphasia support group and expressing strong desire for the platform to continue. However, usability issues emerged: participants struggled to remember where they had placed posts, some categories were confusing or underused, and the forward-facing guidance model (highlighting new content) needed to be complemented with backward-facing navigation to help users find their own prior contributions.
Relevance
This research demonstrates the potential and challenges of designing social technology specifically for people with cognitive-linguistic disabilities. The participatory design approach — involving people with aphasia at multiple stages — produced design insights that would be difficult to derive from guidelines alone, such as the preference for web-like spatial layouts over chronological feeds and the effectiveness of the written choice technique as a navigation paradigm. For accessibility practitioners, the study highlights that mainstream social platforms create significant barriers for users with language and cognitive impairments, and that simplification, topical organization, and multimodal input are key strategies for inclusive social software. The finding that participants engaged more through commenting than posting suggests that seeding content (by therapists, family members, or facilitators) may be an effective strategy for encouraging participation among users who find initiating communication difficult.
Tags: aphasia · social networks · augmentative and alternative communication · participatory design · cognitive accessibility · social inclusion · tablet applications