Hollman Facilitations: A user-friendly tool of supporting children with visual impairment and their families in daily life.

The Robert Hollman Foundation (RHF) designed "Hollman Facilitations" (HF), a user-friendly way of supporting children with visual impairment (VI) and their families on a daily basis. This tool consists of specifically designed pictures on simple A4 sheets, which highlight with images and captions the key aspects of these children's everyday lives. Professionals can easily modify Hollman Facilitations to customize them to the unique developmental needs of every single child with VI and to their individualized strengths and weaknesses. This type of support acts as a reminder, to help families keep in mind what is essential for their children with VI in everyday life. HF are also useful for professionals because they give a clear, at-a-glance overview of the needs of visually impaired children, helping their communication with their families. In order to understand the perceived effectiveness of this tool, a questionnaire was designed and sent to 49 families, asking their opinions and satisfaction levels regarding its clarity, adequacy, usability and usefulness. 36 parents answered reporting overall very high satisfaction levels. A second questionnaire was sent to 29 RHF professionals to collect their opinions regarding HF usability and usefulness and the majority of them was very satisfied of its use in their daily work. This data supports overall this tool, which can be also easily replicated and also potentially used in other settings, beyond the field of visual impairment. •HF support children with VI and their families substantially and works as a reminder of what the professionals found in their consultations, to be fundamental for the children to promote the use of their functional vision and their strengths and to consequently improve the quality of their daily lives•HF favour a better communication between health professionals and families of children with VI, sharing therapeutic indications through the adoption of a customized, user-friendly, everyday tool by integrating pictures and text with oral communication•HF help professionals to identify strategies that best promote the overall development of children with visual impairment and to express them in an understandable way.

Co-designed mini-games for children with visual impairment: a pilot study on their usability.

Digital games aimed at improving cognitive and/or motor-sensory skills need to be carefully designed to take into account the characteristics and needs of particular categories of users. Several novel mini-games explicitly aimed at children with visual impairment (VI) were co-designed by a multidisciplinary team which involved computer engineers and a therapy team from the Robert Hollman Foundation (Padova, Italy). These games are played by children moving within a large-scale interactive environment - i.e., a floor portion placed under a motion capture system capable of tracking one or more people - with the game linking the players movements to the audio and visual output to produce meaningful interactions. We report on a pilot study of the usability of the system involving 11 children with VI. The results allowed us to improve the system and to define a set of guidelines useful for designers and developers of similar systems. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11042-022-13665-7.