Towards an analysis of existing software for intellectual disabilities
Andrés Larco, Vanessa Almendáriz, Sergio Luján-Mora
In Vladimir Robles, Rafael Sánchez, Paola Ingavélez, Fernando Pesántez (Eds.), Inclusión, discapacidad y educación: Enfoque práctico desde las Tecnologías Emergentes: Editorial Universitaria Abya-Yala, p. 297-310. ISBN: 978-9978-10-270-1.
(INCLU'17a)
Capítulo de libro / Book chapter
Resumen
The research of software products has revealed the degree of difficulty in finding existing software designed to help people with intellectual disabilities to improve their learning abilities. There are institutions that promote different applications, free download programs, and websites, but these resources are not categorized, they are just listed. The lack of specification or guidelines to search for a software according to the person's needs make complicated the use of these resources. This work proposes the creation of an initial prototype catalog of software, analyzing the existing resources and the association of intellectual disabilities characteristics with the attributes of each existing software designed for intellectual disabilities. In related works, we found that there are three aspects to be considered to develop the catalog: type of catalog, access, and specifications of the categorization. First, it is important to distinguish between the types of the catalog. There are two types of catalogs or websites offering software solutions for intellectual disabilities: developer's own websites and promoters websites. Also, the developer catalog is socialized mainly in the country where is created because there are cultural and language factors while the promoter catalog collects software from different countries. Last, it will be a valued resource if the catalog includes multilingual software. Second, the software access should not exceed the 3 to 5 clicks to access. Third, the users prefer to categorize the catalog by type of disability because they are familiarized with disabilities according to their background.