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

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.