The Design and Field Evaluation of PhotoTalk: A Digital Image Communication Application for People With Aphasia
By Allen, Meghan; McGrenere, Joanna; Purves, Barbara; ASSETS 2007 - The Ninth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, pp. 187-194Publication Date: October 15-17, 2007
Overview of PhotoTalk, an application for a mobile device enabling people with aphasia to capture and manage digital photographs to support face-to-face communication. A team of 2 speech-language pathologists and a computer scientist designed the original PhotoTalk. An informal study was conducted with 5 aphasic adults testing the basic functionality of the device. Improvements to the application were made based on user input. The resulting device is built on the HP iPAQ rx3715 Pocket PC with a built-in 1.2 megapixel digital camera and 240x360 pixel screen. PhotoTalk comprises six folders, whose buttons are always visible on the screen, labeled New, People, Places, Events, Things, and Personal. A subsequent 4-week field study with 2 male aphasic participants 65 and 75 years old was carried out to learn how individuals with aphasia would incorporate PhotoTalk into their daily lives. At the end of the study, both participants reported that they had used PhotoTalk regularly and fairly independently to communicate, although one participant used it more as a language rehabilitation tool. Usability problems uncovered included difficulty in holding the camera steady, on-screen buttons being too small, and software limitation preventing the importing of photographs when the New folder was full.
Published by: Association for Computing Machinery (Website:http://www.acm.org)
SIGACCESS (ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing) (Web Site: http://www.sigaccess.org )
Link to text: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/aphasia/papers/assets019-allen.pdf
