In this demo we discuss a few possible scenarios showing adaptation of presentation and information to assist autistic students in succeeding in higher education. These students not only have speci c information need, they are also more concerned about their privacy. We use WiBAF (Within Browser Adaptation Framework) for user modeling and adaptation to give users control over the sharing of their data.
o er end-users the power of making decisions in the Privacy vs.
Personalization trade-o described by Kobsa [
This demo paper is the rst attempt of the authors within the scope of the Autism&Uni project to show possible ways of adapting information to autistic students. We identify two di erent ways in which WiBAF can be useful: 1. customising the web page. At the moment the adaptation decisions are based on the information about autism collected through a number of workshops at TU/e that involved several experts in the domain (see Acknowledgements). 2. allowing students to make decisions about what is done with their data.
Those are discussed in sections 3 and 4 respectively. But rst, in section 2, we talk a bit more about autism and brie y describe the situations when assisting students with autism would be helpful. 2
One of the major problems with autism can be described as follows. Non-autistic
people are good at making semantic connections between topics that they study.
On the other hand, autistic people are good at \seeing trees in the forest", they
like details, sometimes maybe too much, but they have di culties setting up
semantic connections between the details thus with \seeing the whole forest"
[
Within Autism&Uni project about 20 scenarios were collected describing the situations when students with autism need support. Because of the lack of space we discuss only two typical scenarios: 1. Lectures, group work and other study activities di er between high school and university. Students are assumed to have a higher level of independence, lectures move from small classrooms with tens of students to lecture halls with hundreds of students, etc. It takes more e ort for students with autism to adapt to these new ways of working. In order to reduce their anxiety we can show the students what situations they will face in a customised way, according to their \CS/LS". 2. People with autism nd it di cult to nd their way around big areas such as a university campus and su er from anxiety when they do not know where to go. They need to know when and where the next lesson is going to be, how to reach the library, the cafeteria, registration o ces, etc. They need very concrete pointers, not a site overview to explore.
Regarding the adaptation to the study environment of a large lecture hall ( rst scenario), autistic students need to be prepared before actually going into a noisy hall, going through crowded corridors, etc.. Such introductory information to reduce anxiety is not needed for non-autistic students. For presenting this information we need to distinguish types of students depending on the order they prefer to learn dealing with new situations and on the type of content that is more e ective.
As discussed in the previous section we consider that the needs of autistic
students can be linked to di erent CS/LS. In [
We could therefore consider autistic student as analytic, visual and re ective
who prefers to read more details about speci c situations, one by one, see
examples on how to deal with these situations, watch a video with an overview of the
university life to get a broader picture and then turn this knowledge into action.
Not all autistic students however are the same. Opposite global, verbal and
active preferences or other combinations of those could also be possible. For this
reason our domain experts suggest that as discussed in [
For the second scenario, the student can be helped by entering the schedule into a system that will then present him/her a step by step procedure. This is again related to the fact that autistic students like to concentrate on one task at a time. Overall, in this day and age young people are used to a very busy (or even fancy) interface style on informational websites. According to the domain experts autistic students on the contrary need a simple interface (without distractions) in which only the most relevant information is shown, with a very limited number of options. Throughout the process of acquiring information they may also need frequent reminders of the essential information.
In the demo session we will show the scenarios' implementation in WiBAF. 4
According to our domain experts, people with autism tend to have less trust
in other people. Therefore it is expected that they will also not trust services
that store and use their data. People in general are becoming more concerned
about privacy issues [
In this paper we presented our rst ideas of how adaptive technologies, in particular WiBAF, could help students with autism reduce their anxiety when studying at the university. To do so we looked at two speci c scenarios. More scenarios and more types of adaptation to support autistic students will be developed in the future. Even though the current demo has been prepared using guidelines given by the domain experts, evaluation of these and future scenarios with autistic students is yet to be done by the universities participating in the project. Acknowledgments. This research is supported by the project WiBAF and the Lifelong Learning Programme (project no. 10018300 Authew 539031-LLP-20131-UK). The authors thank the Autism&Uni project team, TU/e psychologists specialising in autism, TU/e students with autism who participated in interviews with us, Stichting Handicap+Studie 2 and Autastic! 3 for their valuable input. 2 http://www.handicap-studie.nl/ 3 http://royhoutkamp.nl/