Research + Publications
Read the papers and publications on Ludic Design and Accessibility in the Global South.
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Ludic Design for Accessibility in the Global South - Swami Manohar & JOYOJEET PAL
Technology solutions for accessibility have long been created using a narrow utilitarian lens, especially in the Global South due to multi-dimensional challenges and resource constraints: an emphasis on purely functional outcomes supported by sterile cost-benefit analysis that ignores the fact that people with disability are people first with their own aspirations for leisure and enjoyment in addition to skills and employment. We propose an alternate design methodology called the Ludic Design for Accessibility (LDA) that puts play and playfulness at the centre of all assistive technology design and use. We then describe a seven-step framework for designers to apply this methodology to create impactful solutions. Though LDA is universally applicable, we highlight the factors that make it especially relevant in the context of accessibility in the Global South. Read the paper
ASSETS 2019 Computational Thinking as Play: Experiences of Children who are Blind or Low Vision in India
The early work with Project Torino and children in schools for the blind was presented as a poster at ASSETS 2019. This project won the Runner Up postiion for the Artifact award Read the paper
VIDEO GAMING FOR THE VISION IMPAIRED
Mainstream video games are predominantly inaccessible to people with visual impairments (VIPs). We present ongoing research that aims to make such games go beyond accessibility, by making them engaging and enjoyable for visually impaired players. We have built a new interaction toolkit called the Responsive Spatial Audio Cloud (ReSAC), developed around spatial audio technology, to enable visually impaired players to play video games. VIPs successfully finished a simple video game integrated with ReSAC and reported enjoying the experience. Read the paper
Empower 2019 — Braile Cards
Numeracy is increasingly being considered as an essential and invaluable tool in an individual’s daily life, and determines their interactions with the world around them, whether financially, socially, or professionally. This has spawned several educational initiatives that aim to introduce numeracy to young schoolchildren in an effective manner. However, these are either found to be inaccessible to visually impaired students without modification, or use high-end, expensive technology, that are not easily found in schools for students who are visually impaired. This work was presented as a poster describing the ongoing study that aims to create a curriculum for teaching numeracy to students who are visually impaired through card games, which are accessible, easily available, as well as fun to play. Read the paper
Room for empowerment
The Room for Empowerment will be a physical space that gives real shape to the research ideas. The room will see a constant influx of children with diverse disabilities, their parents or teachers or facilitators along with educators, domain specialists, researchers, and technologist who seek to understand and design solutions in an interactive, iterative and participatory approach to design. The physical space located at MSR India will be the archetype for similar Rooms that will be created elsewhere. The Room at MSRI will be the test bed for various solutions to be defined, developed and validated and then spread around the country and beyond. Read the paper
ICTD 2020: Conceptual learning through accessible play: project torino and computational thinking for blind children in india
Torino is a tangible programming environment designed for teaching the computational thinking curriculum in the UK to children who are blind or low vision (henceforth, just children) in an inclusive setting. In this paper we describe the experience of children in Bangalore, India, when Torino was introduced to them as a toy for creating and sharing stories, songs and music. We conducted 12 play sessions with 12 children (4 girls and 8 boys) with diverse backgrounds belonging to three different schools for the blind. We briefly present the reasons for play being central to our effort of bringing computational thinking to children who are blind and low vision in India, and share some experiences of the children and some insights that we have gathered so far: Children not only enjoyed every session, they rapidly moved from playing with pre-created examples, to making changes, to demanding that their favourite stories be told. In observing such play, we could infer that they have grasped the basic concepts of computational thinking– flow of control, variables, loops– though not articulated in that vocabulary. Read the paper
Assistive Technology Research and Disability Studies in the Global South: the Need for Synergy
We would like to highlight the critical need to include voices from disability studies in the Global south in any discourse on Assistive technology design and development. We present the following reasons for this importance: 1) The majority of the global population of people with disabilities live in the global south. 2) The lived realities of people with disabilities (PwDs)in the global south are very different from those of the people with disabilities in the global north, including the capacity of the PwDs to absorb any available benefits. 3) Assistive technology work in the global north works on the premise that independence and access that is equal to the mainstream population is the desired end goal of the people with disabilities. We believe that the design of assistive technology solutions for these populations have to be rethought from the bottom up, taking the social context and the existing networks of support around PwDs. Read the paper