Inclusive Digital Content for People with Aphasia (INCA)

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Digital content is transforming our cultural, social, academic and business lives. Yet not everyone can readily access digital content. The 2.2 million people in the UK who live with a communication impairment face specific challenges. This includes people with aphasia, a language disorder most commonly caused by a stroke. Aphasia can affect people's ability to speak, to understand speech, to read and to write. In severe cases, people may be able to speak only a few words or may have very limited ability to read and write.The Stroke Association estimates that 350,000 people in the UK are living with the devastating consequences of aphasia. However this community lacks visibility. A strong digital presence could enhance visibility, but people with aphasia do not have a strong digital presence. They are not evident as digital content creators and curators. They struggle with digital content, especially textual content, and with the accessibility of current tools for content creation and consumption. Engaging with digital content involves the creation, dissemination and refashioning of rich digital resources for consumption by others over extended periods of time. No previous work has investigated customised digital tools to enable people with aphasia to participate in content creation and curation in this sense of creating digital artefacts for consumption by others. This is the problem driver for the INCA project.The overall objective of INCA is to investigate, co-design and trial digital content tools for people with aphasia. The research will focus on two broad groups of users: people who have significant language impairments as a consequence of their aphasia and people who have milder aphasia and therefore less severe language deficits. The research will explore a blended approach to digital content, intertwining the digital and physical worlds. Project partners, the Stroke Association and Dyscover, will host community projects in which the prototype tools are used to create and curate digital content with support from a visual artist; this work will be showcased at the end of the project.The research approach will emphasise co-creation. Users will participate through co-design workshops. As many co-design techniques are themselves not accessible to people with language impairments, INCA will also deliver co-design techniques for this community. Finally, the research will provide interaction and content design guidelines for "language-light" digital experiences; these will address the specific challenges of content creation.