Visually-impaired children and apps: sharing informal and formal information to guide choice

Digital technologies play an important role in the development of partially children, who require early intervention to help sustain and improve their visual capacity throughout childhood, and also to stimulate their other senses so as to prevent any global development deficit. To this end, therapists, parents and teachers must be able to choose from a wide range of suitable, up-to-date digital resources that have been field tested and are well organized so that they can be located easily and rapidly as required. To respond to these needs, the authors have been involved in a research project, which has defined the key features of apps that make them suitable for use by and with visually-impaired children. Consequently, the project developed an online environment that combines structured analytical information from experts with the practical know-how of the user community in a joint effort to support the choice of the most suitable resources to use in different contexts and with different users.