AI-Assisted Social Story Intervention for Special Education: The Design of AdaptED Stories
Abstract
Social Stories are widely used to support autistic children in understanding and preparing for everyday situations, but creating stories that are appropriately tailored to each child's needs remains labor-intensive for practitioners. Existing digital tools support story assembly and delivery, but much of the work of writing, visual preparation, and personalization remains manual. Recent AI-based approaches have enabled automated story generation, yet offer limited support for practitioner oversight, context-sensitive personalization, and the use of supportive visuals grounded in individual learner profiles. We present AdaptED Stories, a practitioner-guided system for authoring, personalizing, and delivering Social Stories in special-education contexts. The system uses student profiles to draft story text and visuals, supports review and refinement by practitioners, and includes reading-session support with comprehension activities and session records. We report findings from a practitioner-informed design process, assessments of generated stories and visuals, and a usability study with seven special-education practitioners. Our findings suggest that AI assistance can reduce story-preparation burden and support more individualized story creation, alongside the importance of practitioner oversight, cultural and contextual specificity, and designing for varied learner needs. These findings contribute design implications for AI-assisted accessibility tools in special-education.
