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The purpose of the scoping study was to understand the experiences of refugees with disabilities and their families in the US from expert service-provider perspectives, including gaps in resources and services. The authors also investigated challenges and opportunities for technology intervention in this space.

The authors conducted semi-structured interviews with six experts who serve refugees in the United States. The authors asked them about the experiences of refugees with disabilities and their families and inquired into challenges and opportunities for technology access for this population.

The authors found that refugees and their families are significantly impacted by disabilities and mental health challenges. Additionally, while refugees have access to resources and services, they face a number of structural barriers, including the need to navigate a complex healthcare system, geographic placements that sometimes make it difficult to access employment or healthcare services, and issues with accessing public transit.

The main limitation of the current study is that the authors did not collect data directly from refugees with disabilities.

The authors offer several directions for practical improvements based on the findings, including improving structural support for refugees with disabilities and incentivizing health care providers utilizing more culturally aware language services.

While the number of refugees worldwide has doubled in the past decade and there is consensus that a significant number of refugees experience disabilities and mental health challenges, few projects have looked into the technology needs of refugees with disabilities. The exploratory study provides population-level insights on the experiences and accessibility barriers of refugees with disabilities in the United States.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development and evaluation of CanSpeak which is an open-source speech interface for users with dysarthria of speech. The interface can be customized by each user to map a small number of words they can speak clearly to commands in the computer system, thereby adding a new modality to their interaction.

The interface was developed in two phases: in the first phase, the authors used participatory design to engage the users and their community in the customization of the system, and in the second phase, we used a more focussed co-design methodology during which a user of the system became a co-designer by directly making new design decisions about the system.

The study showed that it is important to include assistive technology users and their community in the design and customization of technology. Participation led to increased engagement, adoption and also provided new ideas that were rooted in the experience of the user.

The co-design phase of the project provided an opportunity for the researchers to work closely with a user of their system and include her in design decisions. The study showed that by employing co-design new insights into the design domain can be revealed and incorporated into the design that might not be revealed otherwise.

The purpose of this paper is to present TalkBox, an affordable and open-source communication board for users with communication or speech disorders. Making and tinkering methods are combined with community engagement and participatory design to create a democratic and accessible approach to assistive technology design.

The authors employed a community-engaged participatory design methodology where we incorporated input from stakeholders into the design of the interface. Close collaboration with our community partner allowed us to make informed decisions on different aspects of the design from sourcing of the material to testing the prototype.

Through describing TalkBox, the paper presents a concrete example of how assistive technology can be designed and deployed more democratically, how collaborations between academia and community partners can be established, and how the design reflects different aspects of the methodology used.

This paper explores the question of how can open-source technology and making methods contribute to the development of more affordable and inclusive designs through a concrete example.