ACCESS+: Designing a Museum Application for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Inclusive solutions are essential to improve the user experience and overall accessibility. They contribute to the independence and participation of people with disabilities and can be designed for a wide variety of contexts. In this paper, we describe a design cycle from ideation to testing and redesign of ACCESS+, an accessible application to navigate through museum content focusing on people with Intellectual Disabilities (ID). We have focused on personalized and inclusive features so that users could tailor to their needs and preferences icons and font sizes, labels, and backgrounds. Also, users could make sense of the text by looking at symbols via Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC), and by listening to text-to-speech of full text with highlight, tone, and pitch configuration. Finally, users could provide different forms of feedback: ratings and comments. We conducted heuristic evaluations with an educator and a psychologist, both specialists in inclusive education, redesigning the interface and moving from a system to a user-friendly terminology. We also followed the specialists’ suggestions and made the icons and text of the UI more accessible.