Social Adventure

Abstract

Social environments can be challenging for people with intellectual disabilities. These challenges impact a person's social inclusion and participation in their communities. Social skills development requires training and practice, but training is often time-limited, costly, and hard to access. However, games on smart speakers provide interesting opportunities to improve training access, motivate self-directed learning, and focus on speech. The authors developed an interactive narrative-based social skills training game for smart-speakers. The game facilitates exploration of the social consequences of making various choices in different social situations and uses natural language inputs. Having tested the game with 10 adults with intellectual disabilities, the authors offer designers insights into participant engagement and the game's audio-only, natural language interface usability. The authors also propose four design considerations to help designers design applications that help people with intellectual disabilities participate in social activities.