How Can the Empowerment of Employees with Intellectual Disabilities Be Supported?

The project “Barrier-reduced Machines in Innovative Interaction” (iBaMs) was aimed at enabling employees with intellectual disabilities to extend their range of tasks and to increase their level of responsibility. This goal is to be achieved by an assistive accessible control panel for the operation of complex computer-controlled machines. Therefore, users’ needs and skills as well as design requirements had to be specified in the project. The result is a concept for an assistive control panel whose display interface can be tailor-made to individual needs. Furthermore, indicators for characterizing user profiles and control panels were identified, and a concept was developed of how control panels can be determined and matched to the needs and preferences of individual employees. The complexity in recognizing the requirements of people with intellectual disabilities in a digital world is mapped onto a complex interaction of two sets of indicators—namely social indicators and technical indicators describing control panels. Guidelines on how the results can be evaluated are presented using plausible but fictitious data.