DIGITAL STORYTELLING FOR PEOPLE WITH INTELLECTUAL DISABILITIES: AN INTERMEDIATE LANGUAGE FOR EXECUTABLE REPRESENTATIONS

Many approaches to the definition of animated story exist, but a good “one size fits all” solution is difficult to adopt and implement. Software for the creation of simple animated stories is often more complex than necessary. Moreover, usually, it is not possible to personalize the functionalities provided by the User Interface to the specific users’ needs. This, in turn, affects the effectiveness of such software. To address these problems, we defined, implemented, and tested a methodology to simplify the process of designing software for animated stories. We defined an Intermediate Language (IL) that abstracts basic concepts useful for the description of a story. The components and concepts of the IL were inspired by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and the Scratch language. To validate our approach, we applied it to the design and implementation of an app for storytelling. The app we created permits to define the story by means of a simple graphical language; then, a first translation module generates an IL representation; finally, a second translation module produces a Scratch executable file. We tested our app with subjects with intellectual disability. Psychologists supervised the experiments and observed improvements in subjects’ vocal expression, attention level and narration quality.