Honorable Mention
In the US, abuse of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) is at epidemic proportions. Further, abuse inci- dents of individuals with I/DD are woefully under-reported. We surveyed practitioners who help individuals with I/DD post-abuse to get a broader context on the problem. We found that abuse of individuals with I/DD was often reported by someone other than the survivor as survivors faced impediments in reporting. Conse- quently, we argue for developing a mobile-computing-based reporting tool for empowering individuals with I/DD to self-report abuse. Next, we conducted focus groups of individuals with I/DD to evaluate the tool’s viability, with respect to their ability to recognize/report abuse and use mobile-computing devices. We found individuals with I/DD could recognize/report abuse well when they received appropriate training. We also found individuals with I/DD could independently use their devices though they shared access to them with family. Based on these findings, we call for several lines of accessibility research in designing an abuse self-reporting tool for individuals with I/DD.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445150
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)