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>> And today I'm going to talk to you about some of the work I've done recently involving people
with Down Syndrome and computer interface design and let me just start by asking.
How many people know someone with Down Syndrome?
Okay, great.
So about four or five of you.
How many of you have ever thought about computer usage by people with Down Syndrome?
Wonderful, one person!
Yes, what have you thought about it?
What, what has your experience been?
>> My experience has been playing with a child I know with an iPad and having them [inaudible].
>> Okay, so having someone play with an iPad.
Great. So, let me tell you why I care about this topic and why I think it's interesting.
So, over the last few decades, the model of development and education for people
with Down Syndrome has really changed.
You know, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, people with Down Syndrome were put in institutions.
Now they grow up in the community, right?
They go to school, they're in mainstream classes.
They get lots of therapies, like occupational therapy, speech language therapy,
their inclusive education, but when they transition into adulthood,
often the career options are limited.
And so there's this term often for people with Down Syndrome, they say they usually put them
into jobs of food, flowers, or filth.
Meaning fast food, trash collection, or gardening.
And this whole story actually started, you know, I have a background
in much more traditional HCI, types of questions, this whole story started years ago.
This is Christmas in 2006, that's my friend Alex right over there.
It's a family friend.
And I saw Alex playing, Alex has Down Syndrome, and I saw him playing around on the laptop
and he was like, well, I can show you this power point slide, I've done some power point.
He was showing me all these things he could do on the laptop.
It's like, okay, this is really interesting.
Right? How can he use these skills for employment?
I thought, oh, you know, I'll go search, like you probably do,
I'll go search the ACM digital library.
I'll see what's out there on the topic.
And I found there was nothing out there on the topic.
And apparently there was no research
on interaction design for people with Down Syndrome.
I though, okay, well, we need to start some then.
So that's actually where this started.
There's a picture of Alex as a kid on a laptop.
So it comes from, all these research projects, really come from this core idea
of that computer skills are potentially useful for employment for people with Down Syndrome,
but we need to first understand how people with Down Syndrome interact with technology.
I mean we have 30 years of experience about blindness and if someone's deaf
and if someone has limited use of hands, how they interact with technology.
We don't know anything about how people with Down Syndrome interact with technology.
So, you have a clarification question or?
>> Well, a broad analogy, I guess.
I know what Down Syndrome looks like,
but is there a distinguished definition yet of what exactly it is?
>> Ah ha!
>> There you go
>> There you go!
Right to the next slide, what is Down Syndrome?
So Down Syndrome is actually a genetic condition.
And it relates to the 21st chromosome.
It's about 1 in 1,000 live births in the United States.
Almost half a million people in the U.S. have Down Syndrome.
And, you know, from the genetic side it's sort of interesting, except from that point of view,
of course, we're interested, as computer scientists, in how does this impact
on input/output, you know, how does this impact on interacting with a computer?
And, so, now Down Syndrome is usually categorized as a cognitive impairment.
And if you think of how we typically set up, you know, all these different types of HCI issues,
well you've got your motor impairments, you've, you know, you've perceptual impairments,
and you've got your cognitive impairments.
But it's actually a little bit more complex than that.
Because Down Syndrome, even though we typically call it a cognitive impairment,
it actually impacts on not only cognition, but also some fine motor skills,
vision, hearing, but to varying extents.
So it's a really fascinating design problem,
because you've got all these people with different levels of impact.
Right? And on different types of things that it's impacting.
So in some cases it'll impact hearing.
In other cases, fine motor skill.
So it's just, it's fascinating, to me, from a design point of view.
Alright, for instance, some of the things we know is that people
with Down Syndrome have documented visual processing strengths.
So this is from now the medical literature.
That they are very strong with visual processing,
but they have many more challenges with auditory issues, right?
With hearing things.
And so, okay, well how does that then translate in interface design?
So we're really interested in this topic because if we figure out how people
with Down Syndrome really interact with computers,
then potentially we could learn much more about how to use it for career development.
What type of computer skills they need to learn while growing up, in school?
How do you improve the activities of daily activity?
One of the core challenges for any type
of disability population is very often unemployment rates are pretty high,
and in the population of people with Down Syndrome it's been reported 80 percent and above
of adulthood Down Syndrome are unemployed.
So clearly, you know, you sometimes find these things that are like, oh, the more you read,
the more interesting this it, the more this could have an impact, the more we need to learn
about this, we need to do some research studies.
So, right now, there are actually five out there.
About five published about people with Down Syndrome and technology.
One of them was in my Universal Usability book and that was one that a different group did,
a case study of participatory design of a website for people with Down Syndrome.
I'm not going to cover that one in my presentation today
because I already have limited time, but I'm going to talk
about the other four studies that we did, that my team did.
The survey of over 500 children and young adults with Down Syndrome,
the ethnographic observations of 10 expert adult users with Down Syndrome, the usability testing
of iPad usage involving 10 adults with Down Syndrome, and an experimental design
of different authentication mechanisms.
Now, you might say, well this is kind of interesting.
So you're doing these age groups, different levels of expertise,
you're using four different methods, right, because there's nothing out there.
So we started with, sort of, what's the broadest thing we could do.
Let's do a few studies, let's try different methods,
see what we learn from the different methods, and then we finally got to one where we can say,
okay, we have knowledge now where we can actually do an experimental design to try
and figure out, you know, questions related to interface design.
So I'm going to talk about those four.
The survey, the observations, usability testing, and the experimental design.
So let's start with the survey that we did.
And so the survey, to start out with, we started in 2007 with that, and the survey just related
to getting an overview, a very broad, and that's what surveys are good at right?
Getting very shallow data from a very large number of people.
And so we just started trying to get as many responses as possible.
To learn more about children with Down Syndrome, young adults, how do they use technology?
What problems do they face?
How early do they start?
So it was a 56-question, online survey.
We partnered with a number of parent groups in doing all of these studies.
So, like the National Down Syndrome Congress,
as well as local groups in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.
So our goal was to understand, again, young children and young adults, but not adults.
Now we found that most of the children had already started using technology and computers
by age 5, age 6, over 80 percent by age 6.
But there was this fascinating gap between the skills they needed
to learn and sort of the design approach.
So basically imagine an application that's designed for a 9-year-old.
Right? And it has the aesthetics of a 9-year-old.
You know? And it's basically designed to teach the skills
that a 9-year-old would need to learn.
Well we found that in situations like that, people with Down Syndrome maybe they need
to learn the skills of a 7-year-old, but they're 9, but they want the design of a 9-year-old.
So the, basically, the design and, you know, cutesy cartoon characters didn't work for them.
They said, this is for a baby, this is not for me.
Even if some of the other skills are things that they really needed to learn.
And we also found that passwords were very problematic.
That was one of the biggest problems that we found, is that children, even into their teens,
were still having a lot of problems with passwords.
[Pause] Input/output, mouse, keyboard were most common.
You know, there's this stereotype that when you talk about with people disabilities,
if you have a disability, you use assistive technology, right?
You use a different input device or a different output device.
And that's the way we tend to think of these things, but yet, we found very little usage
of anything other than keyboard and mouse by our young children
and young adults with Down Syndrome.
They're not using assistive technologies and so it's different than the model, you know, we,
we often look at disability at a very broad range.
Well, people with disabilities do x. Oh, well let's be more specific,
people with motor impairment do x. Oh, then you, you need to keep breaking it
down because you can never really say,
everyone with a disability does x. Everyone interacts in this way.
Everyone needs this.
There are really a lot of shades of grey there.
In terms of keyboard use, we each found that keyboard usage was actually problematic.
That for a lot of the kids, rather than using both hands, multiple fingers,
they were doing a hunt and peck, you know, or maybe two-finger hunt
and peck, kind of like this, right?
And obviously that's problematic because you're never going to get to the level
of being really effective using a keyboard if you're typing like this.
So that was really interesting.
And we had looked at kids, we had done a survey and so the next step was
that we decided we want to look at some expert users.
You know, we kept hearing people tell us about, oh you should see my friend, Steve.
Or you should see my friend, Amanda, who has Down Syndrome, is fantastic.
So we said, okay, let's, let's examine kind of the other end of spectrum.
Let's look at expert users.
So we did a study.
We observed 10 adult expert users.
How do we define an expert user with Down Syndrome?
At least 5 years of computer usage, at least 5 days each week,
at least 10 hours each week, right?
They use all sorts of office automation software, they can surf the web.
So now this was an older group, unlike the survey, we physically,
we were there physically to observe them.
It was 22 to 38-year-olds.
Right? Again, expertise, lots of experience.
One of the things we learned, because we're trying to figure out,
well how does someone become an expert user?
How does someone with Down Syndrome become an expert?
And we found that most of our, in fact, all of our users, had taken computer classes.
Every single one of them had taken formal computer training classes.
Some as early as elementary school.
Right? To learn everything from keyboarding, to office automation, internet searching,
power point, web design, some of them did it in community college, as well.
We observed our users typically switched back and forth as most users do.
You know, I'm on an laptop here, oh wait a minute, I'm going,
I'm going to go use something on my Smartphone.
Oh, wait, oh, you know, I got something else here.
Wait a minute, here's my cell phone, I got to do.
And so you find that [pause] they were very effective in just, in switching.
In task switching.
And here was something else interesting.
Unlike all of the users in the survey, our expert users, every single one of them,
both hands, multiple fingers for typing.
And while they had all taken computer training classes,
most of them had actually taken keyboarding classes, as well.
So, there was certainly a lot of variability in the speed and accuracy of typing,
but they all were, you know, really touch typists, as if they had taken a class.
They had multiple e-mail accounts.
And this, I still think, is one of the most fascinating things about e-mail usage.
Now, when we observed most of our users,
they had maybe 10 to 20 e-mails in their inbox, that was it.
A number of them had no messages in their inbox.
I'm thinking, okay, is no one e-mailing you or, and that wasn't it.
They actually cleaned out their inbox obsessively.
And we had multiple people who the moment an e-mail came in, they responded to it,
they deleted the message, then they went
to the sent messages folder and they deleted that message.
Right? It was to the level that one of our users who we observed at a workplace.
Actually had a sign saying, read e-mail, but do not delete it, next to their desk.
Alright. So they take it very, very seriously.
That they want to keep their e-mail inboxes clean, they want to respond to things,
they want to make sure they don't have any out there.
And you might say, well this seems a little bit, this seems a little bit different,
but when you then go the medical literature and you find that people
with Down Syndrome have a much higher incidence of OCD,
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, you say, okay this makes sense.
This is happening with a lot of people.
So, you know, there are all these interesting quirks and differences, it's just fascinating.
Here was one of the most fascinating things also.
You're all familiar with what a visual CAPTCHA is?
You know you seen those?
We have in the upper right-hand corner there.
So, we actually do a lot of research, in my team,
about audios CAPTCHAs for, for blind people.
And so the visual CAPTCHAs, we wondered,
maybe visual CAPTCHAs would be good, maybe it, how would it work?
So most of the people with Down Syndrome said, oh, I love those!
Those are easy.
Right? You don't often hear people saying, oh good, I love these!
When they experience one of those, you know, CAPTCHAs.
And so we had a really high, it was above 90 percent,
task success rate on the visual CAPTCHAs.
And so it was like, wow, this is interesting.
We actually, in other studies we did afterwards, saw the same thing.
Where people with Down Syndrome would say, oh good, I love these!
And I don't know many people who say, I love these, when they get a visual CAPTCHA.
[Laughter] I mean, do you?
Do you all love them?
No? Yeah?
>> What's the non Down Syndrome task rate?
>> It, it's actually lower than people with Down Syndrome.
So people with Down Syndrome actually have a higher success rate on visual CAPTCHAs
than a typical population, without Down Syndrome or without any disabilities.
So, you know, that's kind of fascinating.
But that also ties in with the visual strengths of people with Down Syndrome.
They, they typically, and while every individual is different, as a whole,
they are much stronger visually than they are auditorily.
So, again, we talk about some of our common themes.
None of these expert users used any type of assistive technology.
Again, the stereotype is, you have a disability, you use assistive technology.
Right? Most people are familiar with that's what you learn and not one of our users
with Down Syndrome, our expert users, used any type of modification.
Not even making the screen larger, nothing.
All 10 of them, right, could type well.
Again, multiple fingers, both hands.
All 10 of them previously had taken formal classes on computing.
They had a high success rate on visual CAPTCHAs.
And this is very interesting.
They were very observant of visual cues in the screen layout.
So everything from battery strength to Wi-Fi strength, to,
there were things that when we were observing we didn't notice, that they said, oh look,
I better plug it in, my battery's going low.
Or, oh, you know, look!
The internet, it looks like the internet's down.
Right? And so they picked up a lot of these visual cues.
Again, tieing in with the visual strengths.
Very interesting, just really, really interesting.
So once we had finished that study, we wanted
to examine touchscreen usage, and specifically iPad usage.
And by, these are all, if you go to my webpage, these are all available as downloads or,
if you prefer, the ACM Digital Library, those last two papers were both assets papers,
this one's in the Journal of Usability Studies.
So we were very interested in studying iPad usage by people with Down Syndrome.
Why? [Pause] Well there appears to be a disconnect between the medical literature,
which says that people with Down Syndrome have trouble with fine motor skills.
Outright. And what we see in our computer usage,
which is people with Down Syndrome have no trouble with their fine motor skills in terms
of mouse usage, and, you know, touchscreens, and it's really fascinating.
The original survey, of course, was done before touch tablets were very popular.
People are using them more in workplace settings;
they're using them more in social settings.
So, you know, it's really important to understand,
how do people use multi-touch screens if they have Down Syndrome.
Now, we had, sort of, hypothesized that probably touchscreen usage should be easier,
because rather than a mouse where you're moving your hand over here and you see the pointer move
over here, where it's indirect, and you also have to have multiple fingers for grasping it.
You know, if you have, like, an iPad, guess what?
You can use only one finger.
It's direct.
You see the pointing, it moves on the screen.
So it's much more direct, in terms of pointing.
For simple gestures, you only need one finger.
So we wanted to see how people did and actually they did very well with it.
We were also very interested in how they use onscreen keyboards, right?
Because that would be kind of interesting.
Now this was just usability testing, so this was not experimental design,
the password study was a highly controlled study, this one was not.
We wanted to people to use their actual e-mail accounts, their actual Facebook accounts.
And we just wanted to get a better understanding by observing,
but unlike the ethnographic observation of the expert users, where we just, you know,
kind of said, well show us how you use it.
Here, we asked them to perform specific tasks as would be done in usability testing.
And, again, there were some things we couldn't control, so we said,
usability testing, it's very natural, right?
We wanted to understand not only the interface, but the users themselves, and, you know,
we wouldn't want to do an experimental design because we couldn't generalize from the iPad
to the Galaxy or, you know, something else anyway.
Generalization would be really hard; we just wanted to understand it better.
And so we asked them to complete a series of tasks using Facebook, e-mail applications,
calendaring, price comparison, some note taking for touch typing.
We did some pilot studies.
We had 10 adults with Down Syndrome, all above the age of 18, and, again,
all of them have Facebook accounts, e-mail, and basic familiarity with touchscreens.
So, what are the things we found with our iPad study?
Well, first of all, we still had a lot of problems as it related to passwords.
People still had a lot of trouble remembering their passwords and, so, what we found is most
of the time people had saved their passwords in memory, right?
If not, they couldn't remember them.
They often had to call home or, you know, well, what's the password again?
Because they're just used to automatically logging in with saved passwords.
Visual CAPTCHAs though tended to be easy.
That continued, again, in our iPad study we got the same thing.
Oh, I love these!
That happened more than once.
Features that people with Down Syndrome really found very useful,
were things that our typical universal usability approaches.
Things like search boxes, things like auto suggest,
things that are part of our everyday interfaces.
In terms of typing speed, that varied a lot.
Right? Because what we found is that unlike with our expert user study
and physical keyboards where, you know, all of our 10 expert users all used multiple hands,
multiple, excuse me, both hands, multiple fingers.
In terms of the touchscreen usage,
some were using on the touchscreen keyboard one finger hunt and peck,
some were doing the two finger, some were using a combination, some started doing this,
and then started doing, like, with the middle finger or then started using their thumb.
So it really jumped around and there was definitely a very wide range of typing speeds.
Everything from 3.3 words a minute to 16.3 words a minute, with an average of 9.3.
And by the way, 16.3 for touchscreen keyboard is not that bad.
Yeah?
>> I was going to ask what the mean was for the general population.
>> I'm sorry.
I haven't actually found one that says the mean for the general population.
I found a few touchscreen keyboard studies that they say novices,
they say people who are new to it, you know what I mean?
So it's not an exact match, I'll say that the 16.3 is not that far away from the average
for people who are new to touchscreen keyboards, but I don't have a,
sort of, a general population average.
You know, it's clearly not near expert users,
but it's relatively near novice users of touchscreen keyboards.
And, obviously, over time, the more you use touchscreen keyboards,
what the average is might also change.
There are two areas that were actually very problematic with the iPad usage.
One was that there were a lot of non-standard icons.
Remember I said that when we did the ethnographic observations,
they were always pointing things out in the environment?
Graphical things in the environment?
And so, it was very interesting because there were icons that they said,
I don't know what that means and I give you some example here from Gmail.
We've got that one with the bulleted list, that one which is for a new message,
they got the search with the magnifying glass, but the others didn't understand.
And then on the iPad, the calendar was very problematic.
So if you've used those before, you know where you have, you've got sort of, it's a scroll here
and a scroll here and it's a very narrow band there,
and so you have to extreme fine motor control.
This is the thing that they had a lot of trouble with.
>> Is the trouble with, like, [inaudible] distinct on the touchpad?
Because it seems like that would be an issue on any newer iPads.
>> Is it distinct to the touchpad?
No. It's just that they were using, in many cases, when you tried to pull
up your e-mail account, they would serve up the iPad version and the iPad version had new icons
that were not in, let's say, the desktop version.
So, it's not that it was specific to the iPad,
except that the iPad version had all these new icons
and people were saying, I didn't know what that was.
But to give you an example of the type of thing that was problematic, Facebook,
when they were trying to log out of Facebook, iPad version, as well as the desktop version,
you know, it's the upper right-hand corner, you basically have to get a pull-down menu
to select the log out, they had a lot of trouble with that.
Why? Well, we know that they have trouble with pull-down menus, right?
And it also related then to some of the fine motor control where they had
to point at that very specific point.
They found it much easier just to hit X to close the window.
You know, which it, it's very possible the general population does, as well.
In terms of methodology, in doing studies like this, it was very interesting
because we've also learned a lot about sort
of how you do studies involving people with Down Syndrome.
And I'll give you some examples.
So, every person that we worked with had a different personality, different behavior,
different approach, some people were incredibly talkative, some people had trouble focusing,
other people were highly focused and barely spoke.
You know? And that was just a personality difference that you have to account for.
I'll give an example of one thing, one adjustment we had to make.
There was, one of the tasks we had, and that relates to the,
the start and end date for an event there.
One of the tasks that we had related to asking them to put down a party.
Right? And the party, like, began at noon and started at 2,
and we had one user who said, I will do not that.
We're like why?
That's too short a party.
You need the party to be longer.
We're like, okay, but it's not a real party, we're just doing it
in the task and he said, I am not doing it.
I want a longer party.
So we're like, okay, how about you make it 12 to 4.
He's like okay, that's fine.
[Laughter] Right?
And, again, from our point of view, we really didn't care if it was 12 to 2 or 12 to 4,
we were trying to keep things standard, but, you know, we didn't care,
it didn't make a difference, we were trying to understand the interaction.
So if that was, people with Down Syndrome can be very literal, so if that was something
that made things go more smoothly, you know, don't say, for instance, that you want to,
just put down a birthday party on May 25th.
What are they going to say if you say that is a task?
[Inaudible background comment] Right?
That's not my birthday.
Whose birthday is that?
So, you know, you have to learn to, to sort of adapt.
We used, for instance, rather than asking a Likert scale, right,
we presented a visual Likert scale.
Okay, so this is very difficult, you could, I imagine that you could do it with, you know,
smiley faces and frowns, but we didn't need to do that, everyone understood the concept,
but having the visual aspect to it that they could point to definitely helped.
You know, overall a lot of the findings from the medical literature,
the medical/clinical literature, related people
with Down Syndrome really don't apply to computer usage.
Because it says, well, people with Down Syndrome have trouble with fine motor skills
and people have trouble with this.
I'll bet part of that has to do with the fact that they were not very motivated
for whatever test they were being tested on.
You know, if they're motivated, we saw a lot of people who were very effective on iPads.
We saw a lot of people, oh, I want to try this.
No, I want to keep at it.
Alright. We had one, we had one person who said, well, I'm going to keep at this.
And we're, I'm going to keep at this, I am not a quitter.
I'm going to keep at this.
And they kept at it for something like 10 minutes.
Alright. And so, you know, you, you have to be understanding and aware and flexible
to understand, kind of, what the issues are and how to do it in a way
where you understand what you are trying to understand while making sure
that they're not saying, I refuse to do this.
Now, with some more of this experience and with some more of this data, we said, okay,
we think now we're ready to, we're ready to really look
at an experimental design involving people with Down Syndrome.
And this is going to be showing up in ACM transactions on accessible computing.
[Pause] Now we know that people with Down Syndrome, already,
are very good at solving visual CAPTCHAs.
Originally, by the way, we were going to do a study comparing visual to audio CAPTCHAs,
but they were so effective with the visual CAPTCHAs, we said, you know,
let's look at passwords, which we know are problematic.
There's probably, you know, we're going to learn a lot more by doing password usage, so,
we know that people with Down Syndrome are great with visual CAPTCHAs,
but have trouble with password usage.
So our goal was to compare three different types of authentication mechanisms for people
with Down Syndrome, alpha, your standard alphanumeric password, mnemonic passwords,
and do people know what mnemonic passwords are?
You know when you take a phrase and then you take the first of each one, so like,
I ate my oatmeal today can be I ate my O today.
Right? Typically they say in the research literature mnemonic passwords may be stronger
than regular passwords, we'll see if that's true.
And then also graphical passwords.
Right? And there are two types of graphical passwords that we could examine.
Recognition-based graphical passwords where, you know, for instance in this case, they had,
let's say, 100 images originally they selected in their password and then they had to pick 3
in a certain order, so like these are album covers here, right?
And then, every time they log in they're presented with 30 choices and they have
to do 3, you know, that's recognition.
Whereas the other one is a recall-based password and you see this now on some
of the new Microsoft tablets where you have to take a picture and you have to point, you know,
and you basically have recall of where in the object you targeted.
So you could do sort of a pointing, which brings up other issues related to pointing,
but at least it's the two different types
of graphical passwords that potentially you could do.
We have to recognize versus we have to recall what you drew on the grid.
And, of course, most people in here I assume have taken
at least an intro to HCI class, right?
So, no? Okay, two or three have not.
Are most of you generally familiar with the recognition
versus recall aspects of HCI at least?
Yeah, I see a lot of nodding heads, okay.
So what we did here we did an experimental design.
We did, it was a six-week long study, right?
Within two weeks basically they focused on one type of password within group design.
We had 10 participants with Down Syndrome and 20 neurotypical participants, all adults,
all people above the age of 18, and what did we find?
Well, a few interesting things.
First of all, people with Down Syndrome did, on average, take longer to create their passwords
and longer to log in than the people who were neurotypical,
but there was no significant difference in password strength between people
with Down Syndrome and people who were neurotypical.
The passwords were just as strong, they just took a little bit longer to log in.
In terms of registration time for people with Down Syndrome, there was not a difference
between the mnemonic passwords, graphical, and alphanumeric.
So basically it took about the same amount of time.
And there was a major learning effect for people with Down Syndrome so it was very slow
at the beginning, but the second time they logged in, the third time they logged in,
the fourth time they logged in, I mean really,
it was getting quicker and quicker and quicker by far.
In some cases, a drop of 50 percent from the time it originally.
And interestingly enough, you know, I'm always fascinated by these things,
where people with disabilities are better at a task than people without disabilities
and we found that neurotypical users are more likely
to enter graphical passwords in the incorrect order.
People with Down Syndrome were more effective
at entering graphical passwords than neurotypical users, right?
And, again, they are better at visual CAPTCHAs.
You could almost see a pattern developing about their visual strengths really help them.
You know what?
It's really fascinating.
So you might say, well how does this lead to improved design?
What might we need to consider?
How does all this translate into actual interface design?
Well, things like you might need to allow for a little bit more time to enter,
to create and enter passwords for someone who has Down Syndrome.
So automatic timeouts might be problematic.
[Pause] People with Down Syndrome might be effective with graphical passwords,
but it may not apply to other cognitive impairments.
You know, we're always trying to say, well, okay, how can we take what we've learned here
and apply it to other populations?
We know people with Down Syndrome have visual strengths.
So what we're saying about people with Down Syndrome may be very effective
with graphical passwords that may not translate to people with Autism, that may not translate
to people with other types of cognitive issues.
So, you know, one thing that came up in our study, also, is that we had a fair number
of people with Down Syndrome who used their own name in their password.
And so it may be useful to give like a little widget reminder of, do not use your own name,
you know, reminder if Caps Lock is on because that came up to.
So, you know, these are some little things that you can do
to help make interfaces more usable for people with Down Syndrome.
Over time, our hope is that some of these could get into like a standard,
like the web content accessibility guidelines, because obviously you know you're not ever going
to design a website just for people with Down Syndrome or just for this,
I mean unless you're designing a Down Syndrome topic website, so you want to find ways
to get these little specifications
into international standards for people with disabilities.
So here are some as an example.
Now, remember I said we started this with we're kind of trying to figure
out what might potential jobs be for Alex outside of the typical food, flowers, or filth?
Right? Knowing that he's good on computers, knowing we've learned more.
How could we translate this into something useful?
Well, it's important to figure out how to get computer skills to people
with Down Syndrome as early as possible.
Take classes in elementary school.
Take classes if they won't give it to you at the school system, go to local community college.
Get tutors, do whatever you need, because the idea is
that if you have formal classes that seems to really help.
That should be in IEP plans, Individualized Education Plans, that kids with disabilities get
in the school system when they start putting together transition plans for how to transition
out of high school, computer skills should be included.
If there are any postsecondary programs, so one of them that many of our users were
in was the George Mason University, Mason Life Program, which is sort of a transition program
to teach life skills after you're finished with, with high school.
So there are a lot of ways to kind of figure
out how do we get more computer skills training in there?
How do we get it in there?
And very often you may need to argue with state officials, there's one state official
in the state of Maryland who told us outright,
we would not give computer skills to people with Down Syndrome.
They can't use computers.
I'm like, okay, you know, I can give you a lot of evidence
to show you're wrong if you want, because you are.
But why would you just make such a broad generalization, but yet we often do that?
Well, people with X can't do Y,
and I know because of Z. Even though, probably, that's not true.
So, you know, we need to kind of get this information out there
into the policy making environment.
We need to figure out how to get it into the decision-making environment in schools.
One thing that was very interesting, if you're interested in this topic, we actually did a,
a panel at the National Down Syndrome Congress involving four adults with Down Syndrome
who actually have jobs where they use IT skills for office work.
So things like database managers and customer relationship management,
so if you're interested, I'm not going to play the whole video,
but I just wanted to let you know, go to YouTube and you can search
on Down Syndrome information technology, alright, and there's a great video there
where we've interviewed these four adults, I'll show you so you can see what it looks like.
Here we are, we're at the panel, the whole video is captioned, and so,
you can hear their stories, you can hear what they do, you can hear how they got their jobs,
you can hear how they gain their skills.
[Pause] There's also a link on my homepage to that.
You know, and some of the jobs we found are appropriate for people with Down Syndrome
and when I say appropriate, I mean there are already adults
with Down Syndrome doing these jobs.
Things like data entry.
Things like data migration.
You know, how many times do you have to move data from one hard drive to another,
device to another, one phone to another, we're always moving data from one thing.
We're changing it from our CDs to put it on to our iPods, to put it on to our, in fact,
data migration is actually something that would be great for people with Down Syndrome.
It involves accuracy and a repetitive nature and they are great at both of those things.
Things like inventory management.
Being a content manager on a website or document management.
One of the, the people in the panel there, and the video actually talks,
he works as a document manager for the Federal Government,
and what he does is he actually works with hundreds and thousands
of documents from lawyers in the government.
And he keeps track of, you know, they're always checking them in, checking them out,
scanning them, storing them, moving around, there's versioning
Right? And it's a perfect fit for his skills.
So really there's some great potential job ideas out there for how to make sure that people
with Down Syndrome can get employment in working in IT.
And they might say, this is great!
What are some next ideas?
Let me, by the way, suggest, if any of you are very interested in this topic,
you've got a great resource here in the Greater Boston area.
The Down Syndrome Clinic at Mass General Hospital is actually very interested
in things related to transitioning and employment and so if any of you are interested
in continuing and doing this type of work, you may want to let me know and I'll connect you
with the folks there, you may want to partner with them.
So, we need more studies though.
We need more research studies on things like eye tracking, right?
How do people with Down Syndrome look at the screen?
Do they look at it any differently?
Do they scan differently?
Do the heat maps look differently?
Right? Icon identification, we talked about that being a problem.
Right? Maybe the general population has trouble with those icons.
Maybe there are certain aspects of the icons that are problematic, we don't know.
Auditory identification, obviously for, you know, if we use things, earcons,
so rather than icons, if we use sound clips to identify things it would be really interesting
to see how they do with those, especially since, you know,
auditory hasn't been really a strength for people with Down Syndrome.
Keyboarding on touchscreen, I think some more structured studies
on just that wold be interesting.
And even Fitt's Law type studies of pointing I think on a touchpad would be great.
So there are tons of really interesting research questions here that haven't been investigated,
that I'm hoping to find people who really want to, you know,
collaborate with and go off and do great work.
We need more work done in this area.
There are all these great questions where we just don't know the answer.
And so, I hope you all feel encouraged to go work in this, in this realm.
Before I finish up, I should just give a thank you to my partners on the Down Syndrome work.
So on all these various studies, we've got Heidi Feng from Towson and UMBC,
Libby Kumin from Loyola University of Maryland, Ant Ozok from UMBC,
Brian Wentz from Frostburg State University, three of the doctoral students at Towson, Nanna,
Rumin, and Yao, right?
We've also had a lot of help from groups, so the, the National Down Syndrome Congress,
as well as local groups in Maryland and Virginia,
and part of this research was also funded
by the National Science Foundation so, of course, we thank NSF.
And I, I hope this brings you a new topic that you hadn't previously thought about.
I hope you feel encouraged to go out there and study some of these issues
and now I'm happy to take questions.
[ Applause]