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Dyslexia Friendly Reader: Prototype, Designs, and Exploratory Study

Slide 1: Dyslexia Friendly Reader Prototype, Designs, and Exploratory Study

Dyslexia Friendly Reader Prototype, Designs, and Exploratory Study

The iLearnRW project logo: the word “ilearn” in blue with “RW” in red above a curved line of stars.

Dominik Lukeš

Dyslexia Action

www.ilearnrw.eu

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Slide 2: Outline

Outline

  • Difficulties to moderate
  • Reader research
  • Current state of reader apps
  • Towards and ideal reader app
  • Description of a reader prototype
  • Preliminary user study results
  • Future direction

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Slide 3: Dyslexic difficulties

Dyslexic difficulties

  • Decoding
  • Working memory
  • Rapid naming
  • Long, rare words
  • Focus
  • Vision (rare)
  • Speed

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Slide 4: Typical modification

Typical modification

  • Font type – small impact
  • Colours – only useful for small numbers
  • Avoid underline, ALL CAPS, italics, justify, centre – small-med impact
  • Font size – big impact
  • Line spacing – medium-big impact
  • Small chunks – big impact
    • Lists – medium impact
    • Structure/outline – medium impact
    • Small amount of text displayed – big impact
  • Audio – biggest impact

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Slide 5: Readers

Readers

  • Readers associated with well-known e-book shops (Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Google Play Books)
  • Mainstream standalone readers not associated with a particular e-book repository (Aldiko Reader, Cool Reader, FB Reader, Moon+ Reader)
  • Alternative readers aimed at specific audiences or formats (Ideal Group Reader, AutoReader, SpeedReader, Repligo Reader, ezPDF Reader)

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Slide 6: Typical reader features

Typical reader features

  • Basic features for navigating the text. This includes page turning and outline navigation. However, the implementation of these features is not uniform across readers.
  • All readers also allow the user some level of customization of text display. The level of customisation varies by reader as does the interface.

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Slide 7: Typical reader features (cont.)

Typical reader features (cont.)

  • Access to the basic copy of text (unless prevented by digital rights management).
  • Management of books using a library and a file browser.
  • Highlighting, notes and bookmarks.

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Slide 8: Features of some readers only

Features of some readers only

  • Text to Speech
    • Varied quality
    • Best implemntations (Moon+ Reader Pro, VoiceDream Reader, and ezPDF Reader)
    • Buggy implementations (FB Reader, Cool Reader)
  • Online book repositories (Free, commercial, specialised – e.g. Bookshare)
  • Multiple format support

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Slide 9: Rare features

Rare features

  • Adobe ID (for library loans access)
  • Plug ins (FB Reader and Cool Reader)
  • Chunking and autoscroll (AutoReader and Speed Reader)
  • Rolling blinds

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Slide 10: Usability vs features

Usability vs features

  • Feature rich (FB Reader, Cool Reader)
  • Design and features
  • Minimalist
  • Design focused (Voicedream Reader, Bluefire reader)

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Slide 11: Illustration on slide 11

Two screenshots of reader apps. On the left, a tablet shows a page of text with some words highlighted in yellow and blue and playback controls at the bottom. On the right, a menu lists the fonts Default, Droid Sans, Tempora LGC, Charis SIL, Droid Serif and Cabin Regular, with Single, Dual and Scroll page options and White, Black and Sepia backgrounds.

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Slide 12: Illustration on slide 12

Three screenshots of reader app controls. A wood-textured settings list includes “Enable document internal styles”, “Default paragraph formatting”, “Title”, “Subtitle”, “Preformatted text / code”, “Link”, “Cite / quotation” and “Epigraph”. A grid of icons is labelled Library, TOC, Bookmarks, Search, Night and More. A speech panel has Rate, Pitch and Volume sliders above previous, play, next and stop buttons.

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Slide 13: 5 General Recommendations

5 General Recommendations

  1. Focus on usability and clean interface
  2. Balance feature completeness with the accessibility of key features = presets
  3. Use icons, sliders + steps.
  4. Text-to-speech is essential to accessibility and must be implemented reliably and provide basic navigation features.
  5. Controlling the amount of text displayed on screen + autoscroll

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Slide 14: Text to speech

Text to speech

A wireframe of a row of playback controls: previous, pause, next, stop, and a circled upward arrow.

A wireframe of a speech settings panel with sliders for Speed, Pitch and Volume, a Voice menu showing “Amy - Ivona”, and previous, pause, next and stop buttons.

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Slide 15: Chunking

Chunking

A wireframe of a control bar with a Paragraph menu, Next, Autoscroll and Next buttons, and Slower and Faster buttons.

A wireframe of a chunking panel. “Chunks to show” offers Pages, Paragraphs, Sentences and Words; below are Auto scroll and Speed, currently Slower.

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Slide 16: Guidance mode: Word support

Guidance mode: Word support

A wireframe of a word support card for “leadership”, pronounced “lee-der-ship”, with two numbered definitions, related words, syllables, phonemes and spelling, a games button labelled “Play games with this and similar word”, and Previous word, Show in context and Next word buttons.

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Slide 17: Guidance mode: Text highlighting

Guidance mode: Text highlighting

Sample text, “Jane really likes reading books on her tablet. She sits by the window every afternoon and reads a story. One afternoon her brother John fell over their cat. He ran into Jane’s chair and she dropped her tablet.”, in which some letters such as suffixes and silent letters are shown in lighter colours.

A wireframe of text highlighting settings. “How much highlighting” is a slider; options cover Open/Closed syllables, Suffixes, Silent letters and the letter “a”, each with a colour and an on or off switch.

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Slide 18: Guidance mode: Pre-reading activities

Guidance mode: Pre-reading activities

A wireframe of a Pre-reading activities panel listing Tricky words, Most common words and Tricky patterns, each with a Review button, and a games button labelled “Play games to help prepare for reading this text”.

A wireframe of a Fluency and accuracy check asking “Which of these words were in the text you just read?” over a box of words, with 5 mins and 200 words settings and Continue checks and Stop checks buttons.

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Slide 19: Structure and navigation

Structure and navigation

A wireframe of a table of contents with Expand all and Collapse all buttons and four parts of a book, each with chapters, and buttons labelled Add current page to outline and More.

A wireframe of a Bookmarks, Notes and Highlights tab listing Note 1, Highlight 1 and Bookmark 1, each with its position and section, and a Bookmark current page button.

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Slide 20: Reader prototype

Reader prototype

A tablet screenshot of the prototype reader on a pale yellow page, titled “01 Foxes”, showing large widely spaced text: “We think that foxes have been living in England for a very long time. Fossils tell us that they were alive at the time of the mammoths. They can be spotted by their…”, with playback buttons at the bottom.

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Slide 21: Prototype presets

Prototype presets

A tablet screenshot of a Presets dialog listing Black on White, Black on White (low contrast), White on Black, White on Black (low contrast), Dark on Cream, Dark on Cream (low contrast), Dark on gray, Green on Black, Green on Black (low contrast) and Green on Cream, above Basic options for Text, Background and Highlight colours.

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Slide 22: Preliminary study

Preliminary study

  • Presented to 60 students 9-11 in 5 English schools and two through Dyslexia Action centres
  • Prototype reader pre-loaded with short texts
  • Reading in class (groups of 5)
  • Tablet home use
  • Some students progressed to Moon+ Pro

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Slide 23: Preliminary study results

Preliminary study results

  • Overall positive reactions from students
  • Playback functionality immediately utilised by students
  • Most students claimed to have used the reader at home, some regularly. This is an increase over their regular reading patterns.
  • During sessions, students were able to answer questions about the text they read, some volunteering more information.

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Slide 24: Preliminary study results (Cont.)

Preliminary study results (Cont.)

  • Students varied in the mode they preferred to access text. Most used text-to-speech at least part of the time. Some before or after reading without it. Several only read without sound.
  • During sessions, sometimes students would switch from playing games to using the reader. Several calling it the ‘reading game’.
  • Several students admitted to listening to the texts in bed, one to falling asleep to them.

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Slide 25: Preliminary study results (Cont.)

Preliminary study results (Cont.)

  • One student described taking the tablet when visiting family members and listening while they watched “boring shows”.
  • Several students attributed their reading improvements to using the reader.
  • Many students appreciated the factual nature of the texts included but some asked for fiction.
  • One student admitted that even though he preferred Audible, he still listened to the texts.

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Slide 26: Preliminary study results (Cont.)

Preliminary study results (Cont.)

  • Several students asked for more texts having read all those provided (the reader came bundled with about 80 texts of 300-500 words). When asked, students in one school generated a list of over twenty books they would like included with the reader.

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Slide 27: Conclusions

Conclusions

  • Significant accessibility and usability gaps in current reader apps (even those with accessibility focus)
  • Speech focused reader have a huge transformative potential for struggling readers
  • Readers without full implementation of text-to-speech cannot be seen as accessible
  • Other features still need more research
  • Gaps in the chain of text discovery, text acquisition and reading

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Slide 28: Next steps

Next steps

  • PAIR (Producing Active and Independent Readers) – project by Dyslexia Action to introduce reading with tablets to schools
  • Working with reader app producers to incorporate some of these features
  • Working with document repositories (Load2Learn, Bookshare to integrate with reader apps)

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Slide 29: www.ilearnrw.eu

www.ilearnrw.eu

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