Kathryn E Ringland

University of California, Santa Cruz | UCSC · Computational Media

Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social express...

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly among children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work,...

Multimodal and natural user interfaces offer an innovative approach to sensory integration therapies. We designed and developed SensoryPaint, a multimodal system that allows users to paint on a large display using physical objects, body-based interactions, and interactive audio. We evaluated the impact of SensoryPaint through two user studies: a la...

The COVID-19 pandemic was a time of unexpected isolation for many, as well as a time fraught with uncertainty. In this article, we explore how many turned to playful online communities across a number of social media platforms as a place of connection and support.

Five years ago, our paper, "Would You Be Mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism" won Best Paper at ASSETS 2016 (Ringland et al. 2016). In that paper, we reported on our ethnographic engagement with a community for autistic youth called "Autcraft." In Autcraft, we found community members using do-it-yourself (...

While studies have indicated that teachers are increasingly accepting digital games as a teaching tool, the curricular design work of teachers toward integrating digital games into their teaching has remained relatively understudied. This study explores the learning activity designs of teachers who used the sandbox game Minecraft Education Edition....

Digital mental health is often touted as a solution to issues of access to mental health care. However, there has been little research done to understand the accessibility of digital mental health, especially for those with disabilities. In this piece, we define accessibility as it relates to mental health apps, describe the current state of access...

Working from home has become a mainstream work practice in many organizations during the COVID-19 pandemic. While remote work has received much scholarly and public attention over the years, we still know little about how people with disabilities engage in remote work from their homes and what access means in this context. To understand and rethink...

Digital games have long been of interest to Game Studies communities , but relatively few have examined how teachers design with and incorporate commercial digital games in their teaching in K-12 classrooms. In this paper, we examine a corpus of 627 online lesson plans designed for Minecraft Education Edition. First, we provide descriptive statisti...

The last decade has seen increased reports of mental health problems among college students, with college counseling centers struggling to keep up with the demand for services. Digital mental health tools offer a potential solution to expand the reach of mental health services for college students. In this paper, we present findings from a series o...

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has taken off in recent years, a field that develops techniques to render complex AI and machine learning (ML) models comprehensible to humans. Despite the growth of XAI techniques, we know little about the challenges of leveraging such explainability capabilities in situated settings of use. In this articl...

Internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) may overcome barriers to mental health care and has proven efficacious. However, this approach currently exists outside the existing mental health care delivery system. Stepped care is a proposed framework for integrating digital mental health (DMH) into health systems by initiating iCBT and “stepp...

The US maternal mortality is double that of the UK and Canada and still rising. This is a public health crisis, and draws our attention to systemic issues with US health care, as maternal mortality is a core statistic used to indicate health care quality. Responding to the increasing number of women dying during one of the most common experiences w...

The point-of-care processes of cancer diagnosis, treatment, and patient recovery require an integration of a variety of data and medical information to ensure optimal management. To better design and utilize these technologies, it is critical to understand the landscape of existing modalities and how they influence the care of cancer patients. Here...

Discussions of online social technologies focus on their negatives in relation to wellbeing, prioritizing offline relationships and reduced screen time. However, many communities depend on online social technologies for building community, gaining social support, and even exploring identity. This makes the use of these technologies crucial for the...

We draw on a qualitative study of homeowners who engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) home repair and introduce "home worlds" as a conceptual lens to understand how interactions with the home as a built environment (local and mechanical engagements with its material components) are situated in broad, diffuse, and constraint-rich social worlds. A "home wo...

While parents of young children regularly make decisions about sharing content about their child or family online, we know less about how they create, produce, and share video-based content of children with stigmatizing experiences. Through an analysis of publicly available content on YouTube, supplemented with semi-structured interviews, we report...

Millions of Americans struggle with depression, a condition characterized by feelings of sadness and motivation loss. To understand how individuals managing depression conceptualize their self-management activities, we conducted visual elicitations and semi-structured interviews with 30 participants managing depression in a large city in the U.S. M...

Children with autism often have sensory processing differences that can lead to a myriad of challenges, including difficulty with awareness of how their bodies occupy physical space. Natural User Interfaces (NUI) can help augment therapies to support these children. We developed DanceCraft, a whole-body interface to augment dance therapy for childr...

Psychosocial disability involves actual or perceived impairment due to a diversity of mental, emotional, or cognitive experiences. While assistive technology for psychosocial disabilities has been understudied in communities such as ASSETS, advances in computing have opened up a number of new avenues for assisting those with psychosocial disabiliti...

Much of the scholarly work for and about individuals with disabilities focused on accessibility and on disability identity. In this ethnographic study of a Minecraft community for children and youth with autism, Autcraft, I analyze community members' intersecting identities of gamer and autistic. I also describe the role of gender-identity as it im...

Play is the work of children-but access to play is not equal from child to child. Having access to a place to play is a challenge for marginalized children, such as children with disabilities. For autistic children, playing with other children in the physical world may be uncomfortable or even painful. Yet, having practice in the social skills play...

Autism is a medical diagnosis that has attracted much attention in recent decades, particularly due to an increase in the numbers of children being diagnosed and the changing requirements for getting the diagnosis. In parallel online communities around autism—both those supporting individuals, families seeking treatment and those supporting embraci...

Engagements with social media today frequently involve the use of multiple platforms, which often exchange personal data about users. We explore individuals' experiences with the flow of personal data across platforms through interviews about dating apps, often requiring integration with a Facebook account. Inductive analysis revealed complex and,...

Overselectivity is a learning challenge that is largely unaddressed in the assistive technology community. Screening and intervention, done by specialists, is time-intensive and requires substantial training. Little to no treatments are available to the broader population of preliterate, minimally verbal individuals. In this work, we examine the im...

In this article, we present a meta-analysis of research examining visibility of disability. In interrogating the issue of visibility and invisibility in the design of assistive technologies, we open a discussion about how perceptions surrounding disability can be probed through an examination of visibility and how these tensions do, and perhaps sho...

Maker culture values fabrication and production in both the digital and physical realms as well as the sharing of resources. As such, maker culture provides an opportunity to be democratic and inclusive. Likewise, spaces that stem from maker culture, such as makerspaces, provide the same opportunity for inclusion, even for those with disabilities....

Those with disabilities have long adopted, adapted, and appropriated collaborative systems to serve as assistive devices. In this paper, we present the results of a digital ethnography in a Minecraft virtual world for children with autism, specifically examining how this community has used do-it-yourself (DIY) making activities to transform the gam...

In this document, we as representatives of the SIGCHI Accessibility Community lay out a request and plan for a SIG Meeting at CHI, in conjunction with AccessComputing, addressing the accessibility of participation in the CHI conference. We describe our organizations, our expected attendees, our approach and schedule of topics for the conducting the...

BACKGROUND: Employment interviews require mastery of a variety of skills that can be challenging for transition age youth with autism. Previous work suggests that video modeling is a viable approach to teaching vocational skills. OBJECTIVES: This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the efficacy of peer and self-modeling for employment in...

This article describes how collaborative assistive technologies, housed on off-the-shelf, low-cost platforms such as the iPad, can be used to facilitate social relationships in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Through an empirical study of the use of a collaborative iPad game, Zody, we explore how assistive technologies can be used to...

The use of online games and virtual worlds is becoming increasingly prominent, particularly in children and young adults. Parents have concerns about risks their children might encounter in these online spaces. Parents dynamically manage the boundaries between safe and unsafe spaces online through both explicit and implicit means. In this work, we...

To respectfully and accurately represent marginalized peoples' experiences in online communities research, great care must be taken to ethically approach such research. In this position paper, we explore and ask questions about the ethical gray areas that occur when studying marginalized groups online. We argue that greater input and feedback from...

Natural User Interfaces (NUI) offer an innovative approach to sensory integration therapies. We designed and developed SensoryPaint, a NUI with the capability of superimposing the user's reflection on a projected surface and "painting" this surface with balls of different textures and colors. We conducted a preliminary lab-based evaluation with 15...

Stigma associated with depression and mental illness is a widespread problem, often leading to negative health outcomes and discrimination for people with these conditions. Common stigma reduction interventions focus on two strategies: education (increasing basic understanding of the condition) and social contact (humanizing or 'putting a face' to...

Many clothing characteristics (from garment color to care instructions) are inaccessible to people with vision impairments. To address this problem, clothing information is gathered from sighted companions, and later recalled using low-tech solutions such as adding safety pins to clothes. Unfortunately, these low-tech solutions require precise memo...

Self-expression through clothing is inherently visual and is not readily accessible to those with visual impairments. Presently, the best method for conveying information is with high-tech devices that identify fabric colors, but don't give information about pattern, graphics, washing instructions, or style. Designing clothing tags for the visually...

We propose an optimal load scheduling algorithm to minimize energy cost for residential homes in smart grids. The algorithm is designed for smart grids with renewable energy sources, energy storage, and two-way communication and energy dispatch. Each appliance in a home has jobs that can be deferred but have deadlines. The algorithm takes into acco...