Development and Usability Evaluation of an Application for Language Literacy of Spanish-Speaking Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Luis A. Rojas*, Katrina Sorbello*, John W. Castro*, Claudio Alvarez

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children is characterized by persistent difficulties in their communication and social interaction abilities and recurring and restricted patterns of behavior. As a result, children with ASD require special assistance to practice the phonetics and semantics of words, phrases, and sentences. Applications to support teaching and learning of language literacy for children with ASD generally omit phonetic and semantic aspects of communication and offer limited pedagogical tailorability. This research presents Teleo, a web application that facilitates special education teachers creating learning activities for Spanish-speaking children with ASD, and that overcomes the limitations of other applications. With Teleo, activities can be tailored to different learning objectives and offer varying degrees of difficulty for learner tasks. To evaluate special education teachers’ experience with the tool, a trial was conducted (N = 7), in which subjects conducted three different kinds of activity creation tasks. An evaluation was conducted using a usability questionnaire and interviews with each teacher. Results show that Teleo provides teachers with a coherent and consistent set of functionalities to support creating literacy activities for children with ASD, and that the application is easy to use. However, despite these positive results, overemphasis on simplicity in the design of the user interface was found to hinder teachers’ comprehension of application processes and features. Thus, these remain aspects to improve.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSocial Computing and Social Media - 15th International Conference, SCSM 2023, Held as Part of the 25th HCI International Conference, HCII 2023, Proceedings
EditorsAdela Coman, Simona Vasilache
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages238-254
Number of pages17
ISBN (Print)9783031359262
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event15th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2023 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: 23 Jul 202328 Jul 2023

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume14026 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference15th International Conference on Social Computing and Social Media, SCSM 2023, held as part of the 25th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2023
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period23/07/2328/07/23

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Keywords

  • Autism Spectrum Disorder
  • Learning Tool
  • Literacy Learning
  • User Experience Evaluation

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