DigiAcademy: Co-Designed Digital Literacy Platform for Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

Digi-ID PLUS is a cross-European research programme led by Dr Esther Murphy of the Trinity Centre for People with Intellectual Disabilities and the ADAPT Centre at Trinity College Dublin, working with Irish start-up WaytoB. It responds to the digital divide facing adults with intellectual disabilities, whose EU employment rate (50.8%) lags far behind that of non-disabled peers (74.8%).

The programme set out to close this digital divide by building DigiAcademy, an e-learning platform teaching adults with intellectual disabilities everyday digital skills such as email, web browsing and video calling.

DigiAcademy launched in 2022 with initial backing of EUR 500,000, growing into a three-year EUR 2.2 million grant from EIT Health. The platform was built through a user-led co-design process in which people with intellectual disabilities act as tutors, sit on a 14-member Citizen Advisory Panel, and test the material, with adaptive, badge-based progress tracking. Delivery partners include Stewarts Care and the National Learning Network in Ireland, Microsoft as a global partner, and further partner organisations in France, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain and Croatia.

More than 400 people with accessibility needs and their supporters have taken part across Europe and the UK. The co-design approach and its early impact on well-being and inclusion were documented in a peer-reviewed study in the British Journal of Learning Disabilities (2025) and recognised with the European Union Prize for Citizen Science.

These are participation and recognition figures rather than a randomised outcome evaluation, so effect sizes on digital-skill gains are not yet independently quantified; continued growth in funding and international partners suggests the model is being scaled rather than concluded.