Accessible Creativity with a Comic Spin

Abstract

Creativity and humour allow people to be expressive and to address topics which they might otherwise avoid or fnd deeply uncomfortable. One such way to express these sentiments is via comics. Comics have a highly-visual format with relatively little language. They therefore ofer a promising opportunity for people who experience challenges with language to express creativity and humour. Most comic tools, however, are not accessible to people with language impairments. In this paper we describe Comic Spin, a comic app designed for people with aphasia. Comic Spin builds upon the literature on supporting creativity by constraining the creative space. We report both the design process and the results of a creative workshop where people with aphasia used Comic Spin. Participants were not only successful in using the app, but were able to create a range of narrative, humorous and subversive comics.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Accessibility design and evaluation methods; Accessibility; Accessibility technologies.

Watch Your Language: Using Smartwatches to Support Communication

“…This work provides further evidence for more direct engagement and the co-design of human-centred high-tech AAC technologies directly with people living with CCNs. Much like previous research, employing people with aphasia as co-designers for insightful smartwatch AAC was successful [18,58,60,86]. Using guidelines such as those from Mack et al [48] to anticipate and adjust, ensured our participants felt empowered throughout the co-design process.…”

“…One researcher/SLT was assigned to each smaller group to support ideation of divergent solutions. Equivalently, previous co-design research by Neate et al [60,61,86] used low-fidelity tangible craft and paper-based wire-framing materials to successfully ideate with participants with aphasia. Amongst the smaller groups, the SLT/researcher would mediate discussions and appropriately use closed 'yes/no' questioning to support prototyping activities (e.g., drawing, writing and cutting) of a high-volume of participants' solutions.…”

Comic Spin: A Comic Creation Tool Enabling Self-expression for People with Aphasia

“…Pressing "Save or Sharež will open the device's default share window, allowing users to save or share their comic strip to other applications. This version of Comic Spin was used in study 2 (reported in section 6) and difers from the version reported in [46] in several ways: it has a native save/share function, the user interface has been updated with larger images on the themes buttons, the buttons are screen-reader-friendly, it is responsive to screen size and additional non-verbal caption options such as "... ", "!!!" and "???"…”

“…Within this overarching paradigm, we followed a Design Thinking [14] process because of its focus on empathy and creative ideation. This process (empathize, deine, ideate, prototype and test) is described in detail in [46] and summarised here (Figure 3) along with key indings.…”

“…This article is an expanded and revised version of [46] originally presented at the ASSETS 2020 conference. It difers from [46] in the following ways: the description of the Comic Spin app has been updated, the account of the design process has been reduced, additional results are reported from the irst study exploring the efectiveness of Comic Spin and how it was used for self-expression (Section 5) and a second study has been added (Section 6).…”