Amail: Design and Evaluation of an Accessible Email Tool for Persons with Aphasia

In this paper, we describe the iterative design and exploratory evaluation of ‘Amail’, an email tool designed for persons with aphasia. It is inspired by interviews with persons with aphasia and their partners and has been improved through discussions with experienced speech therapists. Our user studies show that aphasics find current email communication tools too challenging to use. The most pronounced barrier is the lack of writing support. Based on these findings, we designed an email application with language support and limited functionality that is easier to use than existing solutions. The email program has been evaluated in two complementary ways: (i) by collecting system logs as objective data and (ii) by conducting questionnaires and interviews with aphasics to understand their opinions, expectations and concerns. Our evaluation confirms that aphasics find the email tool easy to use and the language support is indeed a substantial help when composing emails. Moreover, participants demonstrated an increased confidence when composing messages using Amail. Suggestions for adaptations that could further improve the support for the target group were also collected.

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