Digital Communication Boards

This image shows two screen captures. The top one shows a grid of images, with a image of the plan in the midle, and the same image on a vertical panel on the side. The bottom one show 5 images arranged on the screen, from left to right: a person, the image of the plane, someone skiing, the Eiffel tower and a marina.The purpose of this study, which is part of the ARC project “A Pictorial Communication Framework for Inclusion“, is to explore the design of applications that would allow people to easily access images and use them as they see fit, for example, to place them in any arrangement on a digital canvas

Through this study, we also seek to understand which types of pictures should be offered, for example, emojis, photographs, or a combination, as well as a variety of arrangements for images to be explored (in categories, or on a grid).

We observe how using the pictures may become a tool for self-expressing, or conducting a conversation, for people with intellectual disability who wish to use images to communicate.

Team

  • Alieh Hajizadeh Saffar (PhD Student)
  • Maja Hjuler (PhD student)
  • Filip Bircanin (Adjunct)
  • Nicholas Roberson
  • Sirin Roomkham
  • Maria Hoogstrate
  • Ahmed Abbas
  • Benoit Favre

Publications

, , Hoogstrate, Maria, , , & (2025) Beyond the Buckets of Support: Designing for Agency and Interaction in Personalised Disability Systems. In Yamashita, Naomi, Evers, Vanessa, Yatani, Koji, Ding, Xianghua (Sharon), Lee, Bongshin, Chetty, Marshini, et al. (Eds.) CHI ’25: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), United States of America.

, , & Beaumont, Chris P. (2025) Communication with Individuals with Intellectual Disability Using Generic Images: Exploring Contexts, Requirements, Opportunities, and Challenges. In Yamashita, Naomi, Evers, Vanessa, Yatani, Koji, & Ding, Xianghua (Sharon) (Eds.) CHI EA ’25: Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), United States of America.

, , , , Roomkham, Sirinthip, & (2024) Human and Large Language Model Intent Detection in Image-Based Self-Expression of People with Intellectual Disability. In Clough, Paul, Harvey, Morgan, & Hopfgartner, Frank (Eds.) CHIIR 2024 – Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, NY, pp. 199-208.

, , & (2024) Reframing search and recommendation as opportunities for communication for people with intellectual disability. Human-Computer Interaction, 39(3-4), pp. 206-224.

Robertson, Nicholas L, Bircanin, Filip, Sitbon, Laurianne (2021) Designing a Pictorial Communication Web Application With People With Intellectual Disability ASSETS ’21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, ASSETS 2021 – 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility.