Interactive Technologies Designed for Children with Autism: Reports of Use and Desires from Parents, Teachers, and Therapists
Cynthia Putnam, Christina Hanschke, Jennifer Todd, Jonathan Gemmell, Mia Kollia · 2019 · ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) · doi:10.1145/3342285
Summary
This paper examines how parents, teachers, and therapists use, perceive, discover, and desire interactive technologies for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The research combined 19 semi-structured interviews and 230 survey responses from caregivers across the United States, making it one of the larger studies of stakeholder perspectives on ASD technologies. The study found that technology use had grown substantially since the authors' earlier 2008 study — all 19 interviewees had used interactive technologies with their children, compared to only 25 percent a decade earlier. However, the technology landscape was overwhelmingly limited to commercial iOS apps on iPads, with 97 named products almost exclusively being mobile applications. Strikingly, there was very little overlap in which specific products people used: only 22 of 97 named technologies were mentioned by more than one participant, reflecting a highly fragmented market. Participants chose technologies in an information-poor environment, relying primarily on app store searches, social networks, and trial and error, with 47 percent of interviewees expressing frustration about the difficulty of finding effective, appropriate tools. Perhaps most revealing was the complete disconnect between academic research and practice: despite hundreds of published research prototypes targeting the exact needs participants described, not a single participant had ever encountered or worked with an academic researcher on technology for their child.
Key findings
Participants' desires for future technologies clustered around several themes. They wanted technologies on diverse platforms beyond iPads — including robots, virtual reality, wearables, and tangible interfaces — reflecting awareness that different modalities might better serve different children. Personalization and customization emerged as the most consistent desire: stakeholders wanted technologies that could adapt to individual children's interests, abilities, reading levels, and sensory preferences, since ASD is profoundly heterogeneous. Participants also wanted more audio and video content, particularly video modeling for social skills. When asked about ASD-specific goals, social skills and communication dominated, followed by emotion identification, behavior modification, and scheduling. Importantly, stakeholders also emphasized the need for technologies supporting the child's broader support network — tools that helped parents, teachers, and therapists communicate and coordinate. The information-poor discovery environment was a major finding: none of the 23 most commonly mentioned products had efficacy evidence in the Autism Speaks database, and only 17 percent had any related research at all. Participants ranked child attributes (age, cognitive level, reading level) and peer reviews from other parents and teachers as the most important information when choosing technologies.
Relevance
This research exposes a critical gap between accessibility research and practice that extends well beyond the autism domain. The finding that no stakeholders had ever interacted with researchers — despite massive academic output on ASD technologies — is a sobering indictment of the research-to-practice pipeline. For the accessibility community, this suggests that publishing papers and building prototypes is insufficient without intentional outreach and commercialization pathways. The authors propose a crowdsourced recommendation system that combines peer reviews from parents and educators with lab-based efficacy and usability data from researchers, offering a practical model for bridging this gap. For technology developers, the emphasis on personalization and customization aligns with broader accessibility principles about adapting to individual needs rather than assuming homogeneity within disability categories. The study also highlights that stakeholders are not anti-technology but are making decisions with inadequate information, suggesting that better curation and evidence-based recommendations could substantially improve outcomes for children with ASD.
Tags: autism · children · interactive technology · assistive technology · stakeholder perspectives · technology discoverability · personalization · special education