Multimedia interfaces for users with high functioning autism: An empirical investigation

This article focuses on issues relevant to human–computer interaction in the case of autism. We designed training software that target specific communicative disorders attributed to autism and defined an empirical protocol to test this software. The experimental software platform that we developed manages each game's interface modalities and logs users’ actions, for the purpose of exploring the impact of various human–computer interfaces, which involve text, speech and images. Ten adolescents diagnosed with autism used this software during 13 sessions, at the rate of one session per week. The first and last sessions were dedicated for evaluating participants’ skills. The experiment was also performed by a group of 10 typically developing children matched on developmental age and academic level. Results show that participants with autism had poorer performances on the richer multimedia interfaces. They seemed to lack the initiative of organizing the available multimodal sources of information. In this article, we specifically discuss the impact of executive disorders on the use of multimodal interfaces with an emphasis on Animated Conversational Agents.