LIVE IT – “Living Labs and Open Toolkit for the co-design of accessible IT systems and tools” – aims to support the accessibility of people with cognitive disabilities and engagement with digital technologies in their everyday ‘lifeworld.
One of the key barriers to inclusive web accessibility is the stereotyping of people with cognitive disabilities as “the problem”. Technology is then framed as an intervention imposed from above that will fix the problem. In this situation, the needs of people with cognitive impairments are often only superficially taken into account. There is a significant body of evidence to show that technology designers and developers have little or no knowledge of the challenges people with cognitive disabilities face when using technologies. This is related to the lack of scientific evidence on the relation between cognitive disability and technology, which is in turn linked to the fact that people with cognitive disabilities very rarely participate in research, design or development. Another related issue is that people with cognitive impairments are frequently bundled together as a homogenous group, so that designers and developers impose a “one size fits all” solution not only on a diverse spectrum of people whose digital challenges and needs stem from varied and often complex origins but on people who present with a wide spectrum – and intensity – of impairment, from very mild to very severe.
Against this background, LIVE-IT’s main objective is to develop tools supporting independent and inclusive access to online content and services, including consumer transactions, for people with cognitive disabilities. It does this by designing and running four ‘co-design Labs’ in four cities – Coimbra, Galway, London and Thessaloniki. These Co-Labs provide spaces for teams of people with cognitive disabilities working in collaboration with experts and designers to explore and build on available platforms and tools to re-frame and reconfigure them to their needs. The co-Labs are supported by an online ‘Makerspace’ in which people with cognitive disabilities can experiment with promising digital tools in a real-time virtual laboratory that can identify what works and what doesn’t.
The two key outputs produced by the Co-Labs are an Open Toolkit and Meta Environment that integrate and synthesise the learning from experimentation that takes place in the Co-Labs to provide design tools, templates and guidelines to support future exploratory actions and programmes in the field of digital inclusion for people with cognitive disabilities.
Partners
Co-ordinator: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Arcola Research, UK
Catholic University of Portugal, Portugal
ADFP, Portugal
National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland