Evaluating Technologies with and for Disabled Children.

Due to policies supporting the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream schools and the use of technologies to enable personalized schooling, there are broad research incentives and opportunities to design technologies for disabled children in educational contexts. A workshop at CHI 2018 with researchers and practitioners working on accessible and assistive technologies for children in educational settings raised two on-going challenges in this area: (1) Very few assistive technologies proposed in research are evaluated in context, notably because of the many practical constraints on evaluation when working with these small communities of diverse individuals; (2) The scholars turning their attention to context raise new design preoccupations, such as interdependence, for which we do not yet have a community consensus regarding the suitable approaches to evaluation. Although this workshop was conducted with researchers working with children with visual impairments, these challenges apply more widely to the field of technologies for children with disabilities in educational settings. The purpose of this SIG is to bring together researchers and practitioners to encourage the homogenization of evaluation approaches for accessible and assistive technologies in schools.