Objectivity

April is world autism awareness and acceptance month, observed to promote the full realization of fundamental inclusion and participation of Autistic individuals on an equal basis with other people.

I explored a number of ways to increase digital accessibility-especially mobile- for people on the autistic spectrum

Autism creates a number of neural peculiarities for example, motor control issues, auditory processing difficulties, verbal and non-verbal communication and expressiveness issues and problems relating to low vision, all these make it considerably tougher for affected individuals to interact properly with digital devices. To be fair, most devices running on top @android and @iOS models have different features that try to palliate the effects such as text-to-speech, color inversion and task blocker.

I brought all these together as a single toggle feature that optimizes the entire device state for use by persons with autism. Mind

Once turned on, Mind enables high contrast text, enhancing reading focus, as autism is generally found to cause some form of dyslexia (a condition that causes word processing difficulties), this is directly accompanied by an automatically enabled text-to-speech feature for on screen text that go beyond a preset number of words.

People with autism usually find it difficult to concentrate or have heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli, hence they quite easily get distracted or have their cognition overloaded. A useful fix for this that Mind also incorporates is the focus assist on android devices which entirely blocks out a number of “trivial” application, some are preset and some can be user determined.

One last thing that is addressed is application juggling and device walk-around, the more flows involved in navigating different applications needed to complete a particular task, the more the chances of distractions present themselves, this is taken care of by a fly-out tray containing a number of utility applications and non-application functions.

Hope

All these optimizations, properly applied, will significantly increase the pleasure and efficiency of experience for autistic individuals with digital devices