Creating a Website for Autistic People - Essay Example

?A report evaluating the processes, methods and outcomes of a website created for Autistic people Introduction The project that was undertaken was tocreate a website for people who suffer from autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A website that could provide information on how to deal with daily activities which we “normal” people take for granted. The following is a report that shows the evaluation and the methods used to achieve a successful result. Aim: The aim set by the client was to design, build and evaluate a website aimed at helping those who suffer with the autistic disease or people that have to deal with autistic persons including those with Asperger's Syndrome, ADHD, PDDs, and other neurological differences. At present, there are very few websites for those with ASD. However, there are a lot of websites, books, journals and articles which target people who have to deal with ASD patients like teachers, parents employers etc. Objective To agree on the requirements of those with autism spectrum disorder and determine what elements must be present in a fully-functioning, educational website, the objectives to determine if the website is working are: Present the developmental requirements of autism patients. Autistic people develop at different rates and in different ways as opposed to those who do not suffer from ASD (National Autistic Society, 2010). To find out how those with ASD feel about the internet. Do they feel comfortable browsing website and talking in online chat rooms? How would Human-Computer Interaction or user interfaces will affect autistic people? Rationale As mentioned above there are currently a few, known websites that deal with autistic people directly. This made the research very hard as it would have been easier to look at other websites aimed directly to them and see how they have used human computer interface to design the look of the website. However, to find the information needed, research had to be done published materials of writers and professionals dealing with the autistic disease communication as well as evaluate websites that are already up and running. The research conducted was at first to list the basic activities a person does on a day to day basis and then to find out how ASD patients handle these situations. It will also try to seek out how the ASD individuals seek support from websites. The main purpose of this project is to make sure that people with ASD and related disorders can live together in a society where no one is isolated. The rest of this report will evaluate the research that was done, the methodology used to create the website, the results where the whole product will be evaluated and finally the conclusion. Research Implementing the product was based on the research that had been carried out during the initial part of the project. The means of research included books, websites, journals and information from professionals within the field of autism. There were two parts of research done. The first part of the research was based on the behaviour, activity and general responses that ASD patients show. The second part of the research is about the way the website was going to be built; the design and how the website was going to be populated. ASD patient research To first process to learn about ASD patients was to ask major organisations within the UK for basic information such as the National Autistic Society and Autism UK. However, they could not provide the relevant information needed that directly was aimed at autistic people (Appendix A.1). To overcome this obstacle, research was carried out through books and interviews with notable people who deal with autistic people (Appendix A.2). At first it was hard researching, as it was something new, but after undertaking the Research Report, researching now was something familiar and quite enjoyable as a lot of time was used just on researching in the field of autism. Using this information, it was easy to apply to autistic people. The website now had information that is useful for the autistic community. Existing Websites for Autistic Persons Many websites today that deal with autism are addressed to the people who have to deal with autistic individuals, or of related disorder. One website caters to family member, the individual, a professional, or an advocate, and this is Autism Society found at http://www.autism-society.org/. The homepage is simple and navigable with a main slideshow in flash of featured stories with the individual’s images. It provides links to possible resources, with consideration for what state (it is US-based) the user might be. It provides other necessary information about autism, getting support, activities or events, and how users may help. Another website is Autism Speaks found at http://www.autismspeaks.org/. It used a simple one-page lay-out that does not require viewer to scroll down, and provides instant information about it being an organisation needing support with the “donate now” button very prominent. It provides information mostly, and immediately appears as a support for family members or people who deal with ASD persons. It also features news or research findings about autism. Wrong Planet is a forum-type website where one autistic and with Asperger syndrome Alex Plank created a site where individuals and their families may get information and resources. It has a blog, a chatroom, and a discussion forum. The user needs to register in order to participate in the forum and chat. It can be found at http://www.wrongplanet.net/. Another useful and helpful site is the National Autistic Society found at http://www.autism.org.uk/. It has a friendly and welcoming lay-out that features images with one major and other side features. It sends out the message for what every button is – adult with autism, parents, relatives or carers, and for professionals. Research on Web Development and Design. The actual product was to create a website. Research was done into the best way to create a website making sure that the needs of the autistic people were met. Four things were found important when designing a website, these were: 1. The website should be easy to read. This means that the pages background colour and the text colour are appropriate, proportional, and do not strain the eyes. The text size should also be correct with appropriate headings, sub-headings and content. With too small text, the user will have difficulty in reading and too big fonts will look like the visitor is being shouted at or may look provocative. 2. The website should be easy to navigate. All the links and tabs should be properly placed in one area or column depending on their category and importance. They should be clear and easy to read. Buttons, images and tabs should be correctly labelled and straightforward to read. 3. Web layout. The layout of the website should be consistent. All the pages should have the navigation bar, buttons and tabs in the same place in order to provide uniformity and ease of use. If not, then it will be hard for people to carry on with their visit to the site due to confusion. It will also look like they are in a different website. 4. Website should be quick. The website should load up quickly. Studies show that if a webpage takes a lot of time to load then the visitor will lose interest and start to look elsewhere (Drost, 2002). Too many heavy graphics, video or streaming content may take up time to download thus stretching home page opening for many sites. The developers should use well-maintained hosting sites that can handle heavy content yet open in a fast manner or reduce or compact the content size for fast download. The above mentioned points are very important when creating a website not just for autistic people but also in general. Methodology According to the research report the method that was to be followed throughout the life of the product was to use the waterfall method (Appendix A.3). The waterfall design took after manufacturing and construction models which are physical in nature and follows a step-by-step process to avoid mistakes which translate to costly changes from the original design. First, it determines the requirements, then, presents a design to be approved and evaluated by all stakeholders (if possible) or the decision-makers. After approval of the design, is the implementation wherein the actual website will now be made. When the website is finished, it will be verified whether it is functional or not. Upon establishing its functionality, maintenance will commence. This was adopted in the software industry to avoid the same mistakes in the hardware industries (Royce, 1970). Requirements: The first stage of the product was to collate all the requirements from the client. The only requirement from the client was that the website was to be educational for autistic people and to be aimed directly at them. Information was gathered through many autistic organisations on the internet. Books written by many people who have knowledge and have contact with autistic people were also used for research. This requirement initially looked simple and basic, but through research it was not as straight forward as initially thought. The client had no qualms as to how the website looked as long as the content of the website was appropriate to autistic people. The client may not have had any worries about this but it is very important to design in a specific way for autistic people. This will be discussed in design below. Design As mentioned above, design is an integral part of the product. The client wanted the website to be good looking or presentable as well as welcoming. To find out how websites should look, the National Autistic Society provided a framework: the acronym used for this framework is SPEL which stands for: Structure, Position Empathy and Low arousal. This framework acknowledges the needs of the autistic person who is to visit the website. The framework has been known to be of advantage to ASD people and that building on these strengths can contribute to the progress for personal development. The following is a brief breakdown of the SPEL framework that will be used to create the product: Structure The structure of a website is the most important aspect. If the structure of the website is good then this shows a sense of high-quality visual organisation which relates well to one of the conditions of autistic people. They are sensor sensitive, which meant that any form of overload on sound, or vision may result to extreme difficulty or a non-processing of the information being transferred (Knight, 2009). In the product, the structure should be simple and continues throughout the other pages. The design and colour scheme was also kept the same so as not to confuse the visitors into thinking that it is a different site. Positive The content on any website, be it for autistic people or not, has to be positive. No one or very few people will visit a website which has negative content in it. Autistic people want to visit websites that cater for them, have information that can bring their confidence levels up. The product should be informational ‘how-to’ guide and contains positive information. It should avoid to stress the autism individual if he or she is a target of a content, page, or images to avoid causing negative reaction or brain processing on the user/reader (Knight, 2009). Empathy It is very important that the website will present the world through the eyes of an autistic person. This is a key component of the framework for a suitable and working website. By finding out how and what motivates them and what interests them that we can then build a website which will cater for them and relieve anxiety. It should be noted that use of website, email, and other forms of communication that online can provide is useful for autistic individuals (Knight, 2009) as it reduces awkward moments of live or personal communication. As Knight (2009) suggested, “The ability to review my words before sending them has stopped me from making mistakes a number of times. Furthermore the ability to Google phrases and look in the dictionary of idioms has been very helpful on a number of occasions,” (P 4), internet options allow one to polish communication processes. Low arousal The webpage is to be neat, calm and not too flashy. There should be few distractions. Now the website had a foundation or a structure to follow. Knight (2009) suggested that web developers should “be logical, and be consistent. For anyone having a website which makes sense is important, backing it up with consistent delivery makes it usable for more people, autistic people included. Other bug bears may be music on load, and other highly distracting elements. If your using a screen reader, then having some music play on load can be debilitating. Furthermore the sensory side of unexpected audio load can cause stress, or “shock”,” (P 9) in consideration of the autistic capacity to take limited data which they consider as stressing. Implementation This stage was to create the actual website. This was done using Adobe Dreamweaver as it is straightforward to use. The screen could be split into two; one half shows the code whilst the other shows the design view. Adobe Photoshop was used to create a simple banner for the website and also for the forum section. Using Adobe Photoshop was difficult as there was no previous experience on that software. To overcome this obstacle, a lot of trial and error was used but later tutorial were found and made things much easier. The website contains a forum where visitors can come in and talk to others. They can ask questions to others who are autistic. The forum could have been made from scratch using php. However, this would be very time consuming and impossible to do alone without a team of people helping, so it was best to use an open source forum. The forum used was phpBB. It is easy to install and use. Only a few tweaks had to be made such as renaming the banner and other details. The stock information that comes with the forum advertises the phpBB package so that had to be edited to advertise the product itself and the colour management had to be changed to keep it similar to the main pages. The package did include a lot of files, so when some of the pages had to be edited, it was a bit tricky to find the right file and was also a bit hard to look for the right section of coding to edit. However, when few of the files were edited properly, the rest was easy. Verification The only way to see if things were working was to actually see the website live on the internet. First a webhost had to be found. The one used was 000webhost. This is a very good host as it provides 1.5 GB disk space, provides 2 MySQL databases and is compatible with PHP. However, 000webhost did have one major problem which was that the server would go down and was impossible to see if the website was functioning properly after errors or mistakes were cleaned out. Team Working Client It was very important to keep the communication with the client professional. All emails and meeting with the client had to be very proficient. When meetings were conducted with the client, minutes of the meeting had to be recorded so that it was easy to find out what was said in that specific meeting and what needed to be done (Appendix B.1). Arranging a meeting with the client was not an easy task. When a meeting was to be made, the client would be in a lecture and that was the only time when a phone call to the client could be made. The only other way to communicate was by email (Appendix B.2). When the email was sent out, the client would respond back with a time for a meeting. Research personnel The people that were used for research information were external, so the only means of communication was via email. E-mails were sent as a letter would be sent, using formal and appropriate language. Professional structured emails were sent indicating respect for privacy and personal information (Appendix B.3). Personal Tutor Communication with the tutor was more casual. Meetings with the tutor were only made when queries were raised regarding the project. The timescale of the product was set in a Gantt chart that had to be updated nearly every week as everything does not went exactly as planned. Waiting for responses from the client and external research did take time, hence the requirement to change the Gantt chart slightly. The final version of the Gantt chart is in Appendix C1. Results The waterfall method was successful in meeting the aims, objectives and the requirements of the client and did so within the timescale set out in the Gantt chart (Appendix C1). The method did not have to be changed. The plan was followed in general. The only time that deviation had to be made was when a few days of extra research had to be done for a separate paper (Appendix C2) to further enhance the information contained in the website. When this occurred, the Gantt chart had to be edited every week to allow time for other parts of the product and other modules. The main content of the website was too little, thus the reason to prepare another research paper. Doing more research was quite a challenge to not repeat the same thing already on the website. However, looking at more resources did make it a bit easier to complete. The first part of implementing the website was to install a forum. The reason behind this was that, this project was mainly based on research on autism. As research was being done, the forum was being set up. At first, when the idea of making a forum was brought up, building it from scratch was the first plan. But when research into making the forum and starting the coding for it, it became daunting and came to the conclusion that using an open source forum which is already coded would be the best solution and less time consuming. After the forum was up and running, the main design of the website was undertaken. The banner and buttons for the website were created through Adobe Photoshop. This was a long process as this software was being used for the first time as mentioned before. Creating the banner was straight forward, however the buttons were very hard to make. Looking for some feature on Adobe Photoshop was very confusing and contemplated on scrapping the idea of the buttons and use plain text as links to other pages of the website. However, a colleague pointed out a website, http://www.tutvid.com/tutorials/photoshop/index.php , where tutorials were given. Going through the tutorials helped tremendously. Adobe Photoshop was used to create the whole design aspect of the website. When the research was completed, all the information had to be then converted into a ‘how to’ style for the autistic community. The only problem with this was how to get all this information converted in such a way that the autistic people could relate and understand it properly. The solution to this problem had to be through research. The client was able to help supply the information to this problem. After all the information and research was gathered, the website was created using Adobe Dreamweaver. This was a pretty straight-forward process as the software had been used many times before. The initial review from the client was that the buttons did not look good and were too small. When the change was made, the only other time the client could look at it was a week later as the client was very busy that week. When the client was back he was happy with the changes that were made. All parts of the website were in working order. The only limitation to the website is that, as it stands it only supplies information to the visitors but not vice versa. Taking the website in that direction where visitors could add information into the website would take it to the next level. The only other way for this to happen is through the forum but registration is needed and many people might not want to register. Many people might not even visit the forum and just want to browse the main part of the website. Conclusion Through extensive research and following the waterfall method, the website is a success. The end product met all the aims and objectives set out by the client. It is an educational website for autistic people where they can visit and learn how to deal with scenarios life throws at them. Future development of the website could be to add more interactive technologies such as CVE or Collaborative Virtual Environments which has been tested in many case studies to assist autistic people to understand basic emotions (Moore, et al.2005). CVE software uses humanoid avatars to help ASD patients recognize various facial expressions (2005). A good example of CVE that could be added into the website is a small 3D multiplayer game as this will engage the ASD community with the website and other people within the game. Videos and images should have been added. Many people will get tired of reading lines of text on any website unless they are short and to the point. As there are many video-sharing websites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc. that are being visited by millions across the world, it would have been better to add instructional videos to incorporate the text that goes along with it in the website. 3618 Reference: Drost, Herman. 2004. How to Prepare Images for Your Web Site – Part 3. Discount Domains. Accessed from http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/articles/9/384/0/1 Knigh, Jami. 2009. AN Interview (by iheni). Accessed from http://www.iheni.com/an-interview-with-jamie-knight-autism-and-accessible-web-design/ National Autistic Society. 2010. What is autism? Accessed from http://www.autism.org.uk/en-gb/about-autism/autism-and-asperger-syndrome-an-introduction/what-is-autism.aspx Royce, Winston. 1970. Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. Accessed from http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Process/waterfall.pdf Read More