I’m happy to report my paper, “A Place to Play: The (Dis)Abled Embodied Experience for Autistic Children in Online Spaces” has received Honorable Mention for CHI 2019. Below is a link to the PDF!
Abstract: Play is the work of children—but access to play is not equal from child to child. Having access to a place to play is a challenge for marginalized children, such as children with disabilities. For autistic children, playing with other children in the physical world may be uncomfortable or even painful. Yet, having practice in the social skills play provides is essential for childhood development. In this ethnographic work, I explore how one community uses the sense of place and the digital embodied experience in a virtual world specifically to give autistic children access to play with their peers. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, I demonstrate how various physical and virtual spaces work together to make play possible. Second, I demonstrate these spaces, though some of them are digital, are no more or less “real” than the physical spaces making up a schoolyard or playground.
Our new article is out in First Person Scholar! Amanda Cullen, Chris Wolf, and I write about disability representation in Overwatch and the future of representing disability in games more broadly.
So, I’ve finally found time to write my last day of CHI entries. I was sad to see CHI be over, but on the other hand, four days of solid conference is a lot of conference.
I first attended Vint Cerf‘s talk in the morning (he was one of the inventors of the internet). I thought the whole talk was interesting. He discussed how everything is now going on the internet and it’s important that standards be created so everything can talk to each and talk to the aliens when they come to visit from outer space. The best part of his talk, however, was when he ended the first part of his talk and launched into the necessities of accessibility. Now this just happens to be my area of interest. And apparently, not enough people are interested, unfortunately.
Vint Cerf talks about Computer Conversations
Star Trek and Ubiquitous Computing, Talking to a Mouse
Vint Cerf at the Podium
Slide on Accessibility
I then went the session on Autism. I enjoyed listening to all the papers presented. The first (Why Do They Still Use Paper? Understanding Data Collection and Use in Autism Education by Marcu et al.) covered why teachers and caretakers in schools were still using paper to keep track of all the student records. Basically it comes down to: there is no really good software solution yet for schools. The second paper (TOBY: Early Intervention in Autism through Technology by Venkatesh et al.) was about the Toby Play Pad, which is an app that is meant as an early intervention tool when parents find out their child is autistic. It targets four developmental areas: sensory, imitation, language (receptive and expressive), and social (eye gaze, joint attention). The third paper (Evaluation of Tablet Apps to Encourage Social Interaction in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders by Hourcade et al.) was on a method to evaluate tablet apps for encouraging social interaction. The fourth paper (Investigating the Use of Circles in Social Networks to Support Independence of Individuals with Autism by Hong et al.) was about social media and using social networks to support youth with autism. This helps shift the burden off over-reliance on the primary caregiver and spreads it around to other people in the youth’s social circles.
In the afternoon, I also attended a panel with Vint Cerf discussing accessibility and what’s currently being done. It’s nice to know some big names in computing are concerned about this and maybe it will get more attention this way.
Finally, here is a slide show of the rest of Paris, in case I don’t get around to a post about that part of my trip:
