Calm Spaces Website and Forum for Older autistic people
Calm Spaces Website for older Autistic people provides reviews of Autistic friendly (and not so friendly) services and venues by older Autistic people for older Autistic people.
The Forum has posts on a wide range of topics and is intended to support the development of a community of older Autistic people. It is linked to the website, but it is a space for older Autistic people (50 and above) and only they can post on it and read the posts. The Website and Forum were developed by a team of three older Autistic people with support from an Advisory Board and input from the wider older Autistic community.
We are still looking to build up content and encourage older Autistic people to register to add posts and reviews. It is still early days in developing the Calm Spaces community, so please do not be disappointed that things are still a bit sparse. Could you also encourage other older autistic people you know to add reviews and posts.
The website link is: https://calmspaces.org
Please contact me if you have questions or would like more information – marion.hersh@glasgow.ac.uk
Designing Recommender Systems for Blind, Partially Sighted and Autistic People
We (Marion Hersh and Barbara Leporini) are respectively a senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and an associate
professor at the University of Pisa, Italy. One of us is blind and one is autistic. We are inviting blind, partially sighted and autistic people
(formally or self-diagnosed) to take part in our survey.
Recommender systems help users decide on products and services when there are a lot of options by providing a list of suggestions. They
include Netflix and Amazon’s recommender systems for films and TV programmes, and products respectively, based on purchase or viewing
history, ratings and search history. However, most of them have not been designed to consider the specific needs of blind, partially sighted
and autistic people. This study will investigate autistic, blind and partially sighted people’s experiences of using recommender systems, any experiences of involvement in their design and suggestions for improving the design process to involve them and design recommender systems which meet their needs.
We have ethical approval from the University of Glasgow. You can complete the questionnaire anonymously and it is confidential to the two researchers.
Please contact us if you have questions or you would like more information.
Dr. Marion Hersh, marion.hersh@glasgow.ac.uk
Dr. Barbara Leporini, barbara.leporini@unipi.it
Thank you for much for considering participation in our study.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is becoming all pervasive, but there is minimal
research on disabled, neurodivergent and Deaf researchers and other
professionals in AI. We (two disabled and neurodivergent and one other researcher) are therefore carrying out a survey to fill this gap. This is for disabled, neurodivergent and Deaf researchers and other
professionals, including research students, working in AI or interested
in working in AI. We have ethical approval from the College of Science
and Engineering at the University of Glasgow. The info sheet, consent and questionnaire are at: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/glasgow-research/ai-research-and-disabled-neurodivergent-and-deaf-researchers-an