Guidelines for parents, professionals, designers, makers and researchers on toys and technologies for play for children with disabilities: How to take usability and accessibility aspects into consideration?

Many toys, board or videogames, apps and even robots are nowadays available in many countries for play for children. However, a lot of these are not appropriate for children with disabilities. Instead of enabling play opportunities, frustration and withdrawal can be the case. Parents, siblings, therapists, teachers are often searching quite some time for the most suitable play object. Designers and engineers are interested in creating play objects with a universal design. Nevertheless, daily practices show challenges for these different persons involved in supporting children with disabilities’ play. As the review of scientific and grey literature presented in Chapter 5 gained only 10 guidelines on usability and accessibility of toys and technologies for play for children with disabilities and no tools for measuring usability or accessibility. Working Group 2 of the COST Action TD1309 “LUDI – Play for Children with Disabilities” has developed guidelines for taking usability and accessibility of toys and technologies for play for children with disabilities into consideration. The guidelines for parents, professionals, designers, makers and researchers have a pragmatic character and aim to support reflections and decision-making processes for choosing, adapting, designing or studying a toy or technology. The guidelines have references to the new gained knowledge about creating play for the sake of play opportunities and evaluating usability and accessibility of play tools. Further evaluation of the presented guidelines is needed to support the adults in their efforts creating play opportunities for children with disabilities.