Action Blocks: Making Mobile Technology Accessible for People with Cognitive Disabilities

Abstract

Mobile technology has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. From home automation to digital entertainment, we rely on mobile technology to progress through our daily routines. However, mobile technology requires complex interactions and nontrivial cognitive efforts to use, and is often inaccessible to people with cognitive disabilities. With this in mind, we designed Action Blocks, an application that provides one-tap access to digital services on Android. A user and/or their caregiver can configure an Action Block with customized commands, such as calling a certain person, turning on the lights. The Action Block is associated with a memorable image (e.g., a photo of the person to call, an icon of a lightbulb) and placed on the device home screen as a one-tap button, as shown in Figure 1. Action Blocks was launched in May 2020 and received much useful feedback. In this demonstration, we report the key design considerations of Action Blocks as well as the lessons we learned from user feedback.