Easy-To-Use Social Network Service for People with Cognitive or Speech and Language Impairments

Social media has become an important tool for social networking. However, most social networking services are very challenging for people with learning disabilities or cognitive impairments. The problems are mostly related to understanding the different concepts of the environment and related terminology, but the accessibility and usability problems common to all internet services also apply. This paper describes some of the problems related to interaction in social network services and introduces solutions and implementation methods used in Kaveripiiri.fi web service. Kaveripiiri.fi is an easy-to-use social network service launched by Papunet Web Service Unit of The Finnish Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (FAIDD) in spring 2010. The main target groups for the service are young people and adults with intellecual and developmental disabilities (IDD), or any kind of communication, attention control or guidance problems. User studies conducted in the service soon showed that some of the features such as registering and logging in were challenging in many ways, also as a concept. Additionally, users with reading and writing difficulties could not fully participate because communication in the service is mostly done in written form. Based on user study in the live service and usability tests of prototype designs, a new version of the service was created. The content was reorganised based on privacy level in order to make it more obvious what is the audience for the content posted. Also, supporting features for reading and writing were added: text-to-speech functionality for all messages, a text input tool with ready-made phrases to choose from, and login by selecting a sequence of symbols. Preliminary results indicate that the adaptations for the target group have a major impact on accessibility of the service. At this point, three main conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, one of the main problems is knowing what kind of information is alright to share in different situations. Besides identifying sensitive information, it might also be unclear who will have access to it. Secondly, feedback shows that most of the problems for the users themselves arise from interaction with other users. A situation where people are communicating but can not see or hear each other can place an extra burden to interaction in social media to this user group. Thirdly, when developing applications for users with special needs, user-centered methods must be used. There are several examples from this project where important information could only be acquired by consulting users directly or by organizing user studies.