PalPalette

Group members: Angela Lee, Masaru Chida, Pu Thavikulwat, Srushti Adesara

Introduction

In our final project, we address the significant challenge of loneliness and isolation among young adults with disabilities. This issue demands attention due to the difficulties these individuals face in maintaining social connections and finding relatable peers. Young adults with disabilities, such as those with epilepsy or wheelchair users, often struggle with social interaction, leading to detrimental effects on their mental health and well-being.

Our solution is a web app designed to facilitate connections among young adults with disabilities who struggle with loneliness and isolation. The app allows users to create personalized profiles and engage in various forms of interaction, fostering meaningful relationships. This approach meets the immediate need for social interaction and aligns with the principles of Disability Justice. Recognizing the wholeness of individuals with disabilities (Principle 5), our project acknowledges their diverse interests and personalities beyond their disabilities. Additionally, our commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity (Principle 7) aims to create an inclusive community that bridges the experiences of different disabilities, promoting mutual understanding and support.

Related Work

According to this first person account, the issue of feeling lonely and isolated amongst young adults with disabilities is quite common. The narrator is a young man who has epilepsy and he mentions how it can be really difficult to maintain social interaction with others.

Another first person account we found mentions how a lot of youth who use wheelchairs are not able to socialize with their peers in ways that they desire and this can leave them feeling quite isolated and lonely.

Some work that is closely connected with our project is other forms of social media that we were able to learn from such as Instagram and Facebook. These are also forms of social communication so we researched them more to understand how they functioned and their pros/cons.

Methodology

We first used Figma to outline and create the initial design of our website. After going through multiple feedback sessions, we made multiple adjustments to our design accordingly with the advice we received from the TAs. We then moved onto the development phase where we developed our website by using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Due to the timeline of the project, we were not able to implement every single possible feature that would make our website fully functional like chatting live with other users through chat APIs, and developing a matching algorithm that connects users based on their similarities. Instead, we focused on implementing the specific accessibility features on our website such as customizable UI settings. Users are able to customize the website to have different font size and accessible themes. We made sure that this customizable UI functions properly by changing the CSS properties in Javascript to allow users to adjust the theme and font size. Different CSS properties are applied and changed to reflect the setting that is selected. In order to make sure that these settings are remembered, we utilized JS localStorage property to store the information of the user’s chosen settings. As a result, the user’s chosen settings will always be applied every time they come back to the website.

Disability Justice Perspective

Recognizing Wholeness (Principle 5)

Our idea acknowledges that people with disabilities are whole individuals with their own experiences and desires, which includes social interaction and connection with others. By providing a platform for these individuals to connect with each other, we are considering them as whole individuals with diverse interests and personalities, rather than defining them solely by their disability. Our idea helps to foster a deeper, more holistic understanding and respect for each user as a whole person.

Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity (Principle 7)

Our idea fosters a sense of solidarity among individuals with different types of disabilities. We are providing them a space where they can share experiences, support each other, and build a community that goes beyond specific disability types. This relates to Principle 7 because we are creating an inclusive and supportive environment that bridges the gap between diverse disabilities communities, promotes mutual understanding and empathy, and empowers the voices of all its members.

Learnings and Future Work

By creating a social media website that helps those with disabilities, we learned that it is important to recognize that everyone has different communication styles. That is why in the future, we hope that many social media sites will ask the users if they have any preferences when communicating online like we did. This step could be tremendously helpful.

We also feel that basic online accessibilities like color contrast and simple language are rarely done as we implemented the website with these accessibilities in mind. In the future, there could be more websites and web apps that implement functions that make it easier for the blind and low vision users.

Accessibility Features

Our website is specifically designed to be accessible to users who use screen readers, users who are blind, and users who have low vision. Our customizable UI feature allows users to adjust the website settings to change the font size and color contrast in order to make it accessible to low vision users. For blind and screen reader users, we have incorporated ARIA labels to ensure that users are able to navigate and interact with elements on our website with ease. While designing our app and seeing how we wanted it to function, we added features such as the wide variety of access preferences to make sure we kept our app as accessible as possible.

For example, the screen reader will announce to the users that they can click on each of the friends they have on the website in order to chat with them. And when they do so, the screen reader will notify which person they are currently chatting with. When the user sends a message to anyone on the website, the screen reader will also announce that their message has been sent.