Digital Producers with Cognitive Disabilities: Participatory Video Tutorials as a Strategy for Supporting Digital Abilities and Aspirations

This paper presents ‘participatory video tutorials’—a strategy developed to support the digital empowerment of young people living with cognitive disabilities. The support strategy complements and expands dominant perspectives on the target group, which is often seen as disabled and in need of assistive technology, by foregrounding the young participants’ digital abilities and facilitating them as active producers of digital content, which already plays a major role in their everyday social interactions. We present the background and framework for participatory video tutorials and the results from staging digital production with sixteen young participants. Empirically, the results contribute perspectives on this target group as producers (vs. users) with abilities (vs. disabilities). Methodologically, the results outline four principles (socio-technical belonging, technical accessibility, elasticity, and material reusability) that can assist HCI researchers, professionals, and caretakers in their efforts to support the target group in digital production. These principles are guidelines for a participatory staging, driven by the young people’s motivation for self-expression. The study and the results contribute an example and a strategy for how to work toward digital inclusion by engaging a marginalized target group in digital production.