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Technologies for Dyslexia
Abstract
Nowadays, being excluded from the web is a huge disadvantage. People with dyslexia have, despite their general intelligence, difficulties for reading and writing through their whole life. Therefore, web technologies can help people with dyslexia to improve their reading and writing experience on the web. This chapter introduces the main technologies and many examples of tools that support a person with dyslexia in processing information on the web, either in assistive applications for reading and writing as well as using web applications/games for dyslexia screening and intervention.
... Dyslexia is the disorder in children with difficulties in learning to read [1]. There is a 10 percent chance for newborn to have dyslexia [1][2][3]. ...
... Dyslexia is the disorder in children with difficulties in learning to read [1]. There is a 10 percent chance for newborn to have dyslexia [1][2][3]. Dyslexia cannot be prevented or cured, but can be managed using special treatment [1,4,5]. Generally, screening children with dyslexia is a difficult and time-consuming process. ...
... There is a 10 percent chance for newborn to have dyslexia [1][2][3]. Dyslexia cannot be prevented or cured, but can be managed using special treatment [1,4,5]. Generally, screening children with dyslexia is a difficult and time-consuming process. ...
Dyslexia is the disorder affecting reading and learning language. Screening is a necessary, yet the discouraging and lengthy, process to distinguish dyslexia children early to treat and help them accordingly. In this study, the game to detect dyslexia risk called the picture rotation game is redesigned. The aim is to create a dyslexia risk detection tool that encourages children to stay motivated and achieve more accurate detection results. The indicator used is visual perception which identifies problems with directions, shapes, and distinction of similar or symmetrical figures. The redesigned game could differentiate the risk group from the non-risk group when a difficulty mechanism was implemented.
... Early diagnosis and access to proper learning aids are critical in supporting children with dyslexia; without such resources, they are likely to struggle with learning throughout their entire lives. With appropriate training, children with dyslexia can learn language skills and decode words for reading; however, they need more time to practice these skills [24]. ...
... Assistive technologies (ATs) for dyslexia provide reading aids through personalized parameters such as text customization, text simplification, and text-to-speech [24]. Additionally, ATs provide writing aids through spelling correction, text suggestions, and dictation [24]. ...
... Assistive technologies (ATs) for dyslexia provide reading aids through personalized parameters such as text customization, text simplification, and text-to-speech [24]. Additionally, ATs provide writing aids through spelling correction, text suggestions, and dictation [24]. Assistive e-books and applications for readings are effective tools, including parameters to support readability (e.g., font and size in Apple Books) and the adjustment of book layouts. ...
We designed and evaluated Augmenta11y, a cross-platform application that aims to provide ubiquitous reading and learning companionship to children with dyslexia. We developed the application following the Reflective Agile Iterative Design (RAID) framework, a participatory approach involving dyslexic individuals and special educators to provide feedback throughout the prototyping processes. We then conducted a user study with ten children with dyslexia between 10-14 years of age. We employed the think-aloud, post-usability session interview, and questionnaire methods to evaluate the tool's usability and usefulness. Our study revealed the Augmenta11y application's effectiveness in assisting children with dyslexia by providing affordable and accessible reading practices. We offer comprehensive suggestions and guidelines for designing future assisted reading applications. We foresee the opportunity for Augmenta11y to be an accessible, low-cost assistive reading solution for dyslexic children with little to no access to educational specialists or after-school practices/programs. The Augmenta11y application is available on iOS and Android.
... The analysis of mouse tracking data recorded while the risk and non-risk children playing the game gives insights to attention and difficulty issues. The indicators were chosen based on the behavior of children with dyslexia [6] [7] [8]. ...
... With the increasing use of computers, serious games have received much attention in dyslexia risk detection because of its convenience and low expenses [6] [7] [8] [11]. Although the results are not yet proven to be adequate for detection of the risk, it provides valuable insights to initial or early diagnosis [6]. ...
... With the increasing use of computers, serious games have received much attention in dyslexia risk detection because of its convenience and low expenses [6] [7] [8] [11]. Although the results are not yet proven to be adequate for detection of the risk, it provides valuable insights to initial or early diagnosis [6]. ...
Dyslexia is the disorder affecting reading and learning language acquisition. Children with dyslexia cannot spell words or acquire reading. Screening is a necessary process to distinguish dyslexia children early to treat and help them appropriately. If detection can be done since they are in pre-readers age, it can lessen the undesirable outcomes for children such as lower educational attainment, negative feelings toward learning, and loss of low self-confidence and self-respect. Many researchers start using computer games for screening purpose. Game design is a significant part to achieve the goal. One of the challenges in creating a game for children is designing the game that maintains children’s attention until they finish the game. In addition, the level of difficulties must be suitable for the participants’ skill. Thus, this paper presents a pilot study to develop a picture rotation game. The game was designed mainly to study behavior of children with dyslexia while overlooking the game element principles. This study found that game playing behavior of the two groups of children was different. The difficulty levels of the game were found to have influences on the gameplay behaviors of both groups. The findings are used as the guidelines to improve the design of the game to better assess the risk of dyslexia children.
... Current detection tools mainly use linguistic elements such as spelling or reading errors to detect dyslexia [12,27,41], which can only detect readers. Consequently, new indicators and tools for the detection of pre-readers are required, which would give children with dyslexia more time to succeed. ...
... Web or mobile applications have been used to predict readers and pre-readers with dyslexia [27,33] using linguistic content or to measure the readability with sensor data (mouse movements) [32]. Games have been designed with dyslexia related indicators (language related [9,10,41] or language-independent [24,26,28]) to 1 A thread of the discussion can be found here: https://twitter.com/zacharylipton/status/ ...
Dyslexia is a widespread specific learning disorder, which can have a particularly negative influence on the learning success of children. Early detection of dyslexia is the foundation for early intervention, which is the key to reduce the adverse effects of dyslexia, e.g., bad school grades. In this paper, we present the prototype of a puzzle app, which we explicitly designed with the human-centred design (HCD) process for dyslexia screening in pre-reader using new indicators related to motor skills to ensure users needs for the data collection to apply machine learning prediction. The app records the telemetry of the gaming sequence in order to derive future statements about the prevalence of dyslexia based on the telemetry data. The high-fidelity prototype was evaluated with a five-user test usability study with five German-speaking child-parent pairs. The results show how young children and parents are interacting with new games, and how new applications (web and mobile technologies) which are used for online experiments, could be developed. The usability of the prototype is suitable for the target group with only minor limitations.
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... 'MyLexia' (El Kah and Lakhouaja 2018) is another multimedia mobilebased application developed for dyslexic children. The general conclusion is that gaming-based interventions and frameworks can enhance the learning capabilities of dyslexic children and be used as a tool for them (Rauschenberger et al. 2019). Recently, a mobile-based screening system was introduced for children with Dysgraphia. ...
Over the years, researchers have discovered increased problems among children related to reading and writing. Dyslexia and Dysgraphia are the most common problems they try to solve with various paper-based activities and gaming interventions. But they either lack interactivity, and children get bored of the games after some time, or therapists and parents cannot learn about their children's performance. Augmented Reality is nowadays evolving technology in the field of education. Although some Augmented Reality applications have developed in the market, there is no feasible solution for children suffering from Dyslexia and Dysgraphia. In this paper, we developed an Augmented Reality-based Serious Game named ARLexic game to train children with Dyslexia and Dysgraphia. We performed an experiment with dyslexic and dysgraphic children aged from 7 to 14 years, along with their teachers, to evaluate their performance. Our study results show that ARLexic Game is an entertaining and easy-to-use game for children. Children also engage with the application for a longer time due to Augmented Reality.
... Multiple studies have the goal of improving the understanding of dyslexia from multiple different aspects, including neural activity [9,10], visual sampling strategy [11][12][13], emotional response [14,15], educational performance [16,17], social status [18,19], and others [20][21][22][23]. However, considering the nature of experimental and study requirements, implementations of the study results for assistive and treatment purposes often prove to be a challenge in itself [24][25][26]. ...
Developing reliable, quantifiable, and accessible metrics for dyslexia diagnosis and tracking represents an important goal, considering the widespread nature of dyslexia and its negative impact on education and quality of life. In this study, we observe eye-tracking data from 15 dyslexic and 15 neurotypical Serbian school-age children who read text segments presented on different color configurations. Two new eye-tracking features were introduced that quantify the amount of spatial complexity of the subject’s gaze through time and inherently provide information regarding the locations in the text in which the subject struggled the most. The features were extracted from the raw eye-tracking data (x, y coordinates), from the original data gathered at 60 Hz, and from the downsampled data at 30 Hz, examining the compatibility of features with low-cost or custom-made eye-trackers. The features were used as inputs to machine learning algorithms, and the best-obtained accuracy was 88.9% for 60 Hz and 87.8% for 30 Hz. The features were also used to analyze the influence of background/overlay color on the quality of reading, and it was shown that the introduced features separate the dyslexic and control groups regardless of the background/overlay color. The colors can, however, influence each subject differently, which implies that an individualistic approach would be necessary to obtain the best therapeutic results. The performed study shows promise in dyslexia detection and evaluation, as the proposed features can be implemented in real time as feedback during reading and show effectiveness at detecting dyslexia with data obtained using a lower sampling rate.
... Various applications and games to support, detect and treat dyslexia have been developed (Rauschenberger et al., 2019b). Gamification has been used to design various use cases, applications as well as frameworks (Hamari et al., 2014;Ritzhaupt et al., 2014;Mora et al., 2015;Seaborn and Fels, 2015;Thomas et al., 2021). ...
Children with dyslexia have difficulties learning how to read and write. They are often diagnosed after they fail school even if dyslexia is not related to general intelligence. Early screening of dyslexia can prevent the negative side effects of late detection and enables early intervention. In this context, we present an approach for universal screening of dyslexia using machine learning models with data gathered from a web-based language-independent game.
We designed the game content taking into consideration the analysis of mistakes of people with dyslexia in different languages and other parameters related to dyslexia like auditory perception as well as visual perception.
We did a user study with 313 children (116 with dyslexia) and train predictive machine learning models with the collected data. Our method yields an accuracy of 0.74 for German and 0.69 for Spanish as well as a F1-score of 0.75 for German and 0.75 for Spanish, using Random Forests and Extra Trees, respectively.
We also present the collected user data, game content design, potential new auditory input, and knowledge about the design approach for future research to explore universal screening of dyslexia.
Universal screening with language-independent content can be used for the screening of pre-readers who do not have any language skills, facilitating a potential early intervention.
... Early diagnosis and access to proper learning aids are critical in supporting children with dyslexia; without such resources, they are likely to struggle with learning throughout their entire lives. With appropriate training, children with dyslexia can learn language skills and decode words for reading; however, they need more time to practice these skills [7]. ...
We designed Augmenta11y, a cross-platform application that aims to provide ubiquitous reading and learning companionship to children with dyslexia. This paper presents the iterative user-centered design process and implementation details of the application and offers suggestions and guidelines for designing future assisted reading applications. We foresee the opportunity for Augmenta11y to be an accessible, low-cost assistive reading solution for dyslexic children with little to no access to educational specialists or after-school practices. The Augmenta11y application is available on iOS and Android.
... When taking into account participants with a learning disorder, in our case, participants with dyslexia, we need to address their needs [38] in the design of the application and the experiment as well as consider the ethical aspects [7]. As dyslexia is connected to nine genetic markers and reading ability is highly hereditary [14], we support readability for participants' supervisors (who could be parents) with a large font size (minimum 18 points) [43]. ...
When discussing interpretable machine learning results, researchers need to compare them and check for reliability, especially for health-related data. The reason is the negative impact of wrong results on a person, such as in wrong prediction of cancer, incorrect assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic situation, or missing early screening of dyslexia. Often only small data exists for these complex interdisciplinary research projects. Hence, it is essential that this type of research understands different methodologies and mindsets such as the Design Science Methodology, Human-Centered Design or Data Science approaches to ensure interpretable and reliable results. Therefore, we present various recommendations and design considerations for experiments that help to avoid over-fitting and biased interpretation of results when having small imbalanced data related to health. We also present two very different use cases: early screening of dyslexia and event prediction in multiple sclerosis.
... When taking into account participants with a learning disorder, in our case, participants with dyslexia, we need to address their needs [34] in the design of the application and the experiment as well as consider the ethical aspects [6]. As dyslexia is connected to nine genetic markers and reading ability is highly hereditary [12], we support readability for participants' supervisors (who could be parents) with a large font size (minimum 18 points) [39]. ...
When discussing interpretable machine learning results, researchers need to compare results and reflect on reliable results, especially for health-related data. The reason is the negative impact of wrong results on a person, such as in missing early screening of dyslexia or wrong prediction of cancer. We present nine criteria that help avoiding over-fitting and biased interpretation of results when having small imbalanced data related to health. We present a use case of early screening of dyslexia with an imbalanced data set using machine learning classification to explain design decisions and discuss issues for further research.
... Such corpora can be used as source of knowledge to study different aspects of dyslexia. They can also be used to develop tools such as spellcheckers and games, and for screening with applications for readers (Rauschenberger et al., 2019), e.g. Dytective (Rello et al., 2016) To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no available data set for French with reading errors of poor readers and dyslexics. ...
In this paper, we present a new parallel corpus addressed to researchers, teachers, and speech therapists interested in text simplification as a means of alleviating difficulties in children learning to read. The corpus is composed of excerpts drawn from 79 authentic literary (tales, stories) and scientific (documentary) texts commonly used in French schools for children aged between 7 to 9 years old. The excerpts were manually simplified at the lexical, morpho-syntactic, and discourse levels in order to propose a parallel corpus for reading tests and for the development of automatic text simplification tools. A sample of 21 poor-reading and dyslexic children with an average reading delay of 2.5 years read a portion of the corpus. The transcripts of readings errors were integrated into the corpus with the goal of identifying lexical difficulty in the target population. By means of statistical testing, we provide evidence that the manual simplifications significantly reduced reading errors, highlighting that the words targeted for simplification were not only well-chosen but also substituted with substantially easier alternatives. The entire corpus is available for consultation through a web interface and available on demand for research purposes.
... Various applications and games to support, detect and treat dyslexia have been developed [31]. Gamification has been used to design various use cases, applications as well as frameworks [14,22,41,47]. ...
Children with dyslexia are often diagnosed after they fail school even if dyslexia is not related to general intelligence. In this work, we present an approach for universal screening of dyslexia using machine learning models with data gathered from a web-based language-independent game. We designed the game content taking into consideration the analysis of mistakes of people with dyslexia in different languages and other parameters related to dyslexia like auditory perception as well as visual perception. We did a user study with 313 children (116 with dyslexia) and train predictive machine learning models with the collected data. Our method yields an accuracy of 0.74 for German and 0.69 for Spanish as well as an F1-score of 0.75 for German and 0.75 for Spanish, using Random Forests and Extra Trees, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that risk of dyslexia is screened using a language-independent content web-based game and machine-learning. Universal screening with language-independent content can be used for the screening of pre-readers who do not have any language skills, facilitating a potential early intervention.
Identifying early a person with dyslexia, a learning disorder with reading and writing, is critical for effective treatment. As accredited specialists for clinical diagnosis of dyslexia are costly and undersupplied, we research and develop a computer-assisted approach to efficiently prescreen dyslexic Chinese children so that timely resources can be channelled to those at higher risk. Previous works in this area are mostly for English and other alphabetic languages, tailored narrowly for the reading disorder, or require costly specialized equipment. To overcome that, we present DYPA, a novel DYslexia Prescreening mobile Application for Chinese children. DYPA collects multimodal data from children through a set of specially designed interactive reading and writing tests in Chinese, and comprehensively analyzes their cognitive-linguistic skills with machine learning. To better account for the dyslexia-associated features in handwritten characters, DYPA employs a deep learning based multilevel Chinese handwriting analysis framework to extract features across the stroke, radical and character levels. We have implemented and installed DYPA in tablets, and our extensive trials with more than 200 pupils in Hong Kong validate its high predictive accuracy (81.14%), sensitivity (74.27%) and specificity (82.71%).
In Saudi Arabia, the COVID-19 pandemic forced students with dyslexia to complete their learning through online applications, like their peers without dyslexia. This study explores the influence of assistive technology (AT) on improving the visual perception (VP) and phonological processing (PhP) abilities of students with dyslexia. Three learning applications were used (Google Classroom, Zoom, and Quizlet) as AT platforms. A quantitative approach was adopted based on a quasi-experimental design. Single-subject experimental methods were used to examine the influence of AT on improving students’ VP, PhP, and frequency of access (FA). Fourteen students with dyslexia who were selected as participants through purposeful sampling were divided into two experimental groups based on gender. The results showed that AT influenced the VP, PhP, and FA in both experimental groups. Girls scored higher than boys in VP, PhP, and FA, and a positive correlation was found between VP and PhP with AT applications among girls and boys. A simple linear regression analysis showed that a significant and positive relationship exists between FA and the VP and PhP abilities of students with dyslexia through AT applications.
Massive and timely screening of the student population for early signs of reading difficulties is needed to implement timely effective remediation of these difficulties. However, traditional approaches are costly and hard to apply. Here we present Lexiland, a tablet-based reading assessment tool for kindergarten and primary school children developed to be applied in school settings with minimal personnel intervention. Following a story line, players help a character of the game perform several tasks that measure different predictors of reading outcomes. Most of the tasks that usually involve a verbal response were switched to receptive tasks to demand a touch-screen response only. The tablet application was administered to a sample of N=616 5-yo kindergarten children and to a sub-sample of these children twice during the following two years (First and Second Grades). Applying logistic regression and cross-validation, we selected a reduced subset of tasks that can predict with great sensitivity and specificity, whether a five-year-old child will have reading difficulties by the end of first grade (sensitivity, 90% and specificity 76%) and two years later (sensitivity 90%, specificity, 61%). Importantly, Lexiland is a scalable tool to implement universal screening, given the increasing availability of devices able to run android and iOS applications.
Augmented Reality Game for based learning has been enhanced the learning experienced and developed the knowledge and skills of the user. The project methodology used in this study is the game development life cycle (GDLC). It includes initiation, pre-production, production, testing, beta testing and release. The purpose of this project is to produce video games for children with dyslexia who have visual and auditory learning difficulties related to memory, time management, speed processing, organization, organization and planning. The objective of this product was to develop Augmented Reality games for dyslexia students, second was to develop Reality-based games on reading, spelling and numbers for dyslexia students using the Unity Game Engine, the third was to test the appropriateness of learning based on reading, spelling games and numbers for dyslexic students. The number of user targets used to test this product are dyslexia students, teachers who teach dyslexia students, expert programmers and designer games and evaluators from the eLearning Carnival & Conference (eLCC 2019). The result of this DyslexiAR learning game is that dyslexic students have a better understanding of learning to read, spell and learn numbers.
Children with dyslexia have difficulties learning how to read and write. They are often diagnosed after they fail in school, even though dyslexia is not related to general intelligence. In this thesis, we present an approach for earlier screening of dyslexia using a language-independent game in combination with machine learning models trained with the interaction data. By earlier, we mean before children learn how to read and write.
To reach this goal, we designed the game content with knowl- edge of the analysis of word errors from people with dyslexia in different languages and the parameters reported to be related to dyslexia, such as auditory and visual perception. With our two de- signed games (MusVis and DGames), we collected data sets (313 and 137 participants) in different languages (mainly Spanish and German) and evaluated them with machine learning classifiers. For MusVis we mainly use content that refers to one single acoustic or visual indicator, while DGames content refers to generic content related to various indicators. Our method provides an accuracy of 0.74 for German and 0.69 for Spanish and F1-scores of 0.75 for German and 0.75 for Spanish in MusVis when Random Forest and Extra Trees are used. DGames was mainly evaluated with German and reached a peak accuracy of 0.67 and a peak F1-score of 0.74. Our results open the possibility of low-cost and early screening of dyslexia through the Web.
Using serious games to screen dyslexia has been a suc- cessful approach for English, German and Spanish. In a pilot study with a desktop game, we addressed pre-readers screening, that is, younger children who have not acquired reading or writing skills. Based on our results, we have redesigned the game content and new interactions with visual and musical cues. Hence, here we present a tablet game, DGames, which has the potential to predict dyslexia in pre-readers. This could contribute to around 10% of the population that is affected by dyslexia, as children will gain more time to learn to cope with the challenges of learning how to read and write.
The importance of diagnostic, demographic, and neurocognitive correlates of dysgraphia in 1006 students 6–16 years was determined. Children with ADHD or autism (n = 831) and neurotypical children (n = 175) were administered the Developmental Test of Visual-Motor Integration (VMI), Wechsler subscales, and reading and math tests. IQ was the strongest correlate of dysgraphia (VMI scores), followed by diagnosis (ADHD/autism vs. neurotypical). Visual-fine motor ability was the only other significant correlate. Verbal and visual reasoning ability, processing speed, working memory, attention, reading, and math did not contribute significantly more to concurrently predicting dysgraphia, nor did age, sex, race, and parent occupation. Dysgraphia was common in children with ADHD (56%) and autism (56%), especially those with a learning disability in reading (71%) or math (72%). The study demonstrates the importance of controlling for both IQ and diagnosis when examining factors related to dysgraphia, which previous studies have not done. Students with ADHD, autism, learning disability, or fine motor problems should be evaluated for dysgraphia because the majority of students with any one of these problems will have impaired handwriting, which needs to be identified and addressed in school. Effective accommodations to compensate for dysgraphia are available to help avoid its negative repercussions.
As many as 20% of English speakers have dyslexia, a language disability that impacts reading and spelling. Web search is an important modern literacy skill, yet the accessibility of this language-centric endeavor to people with dyslexia is largely unexplored. We interviewed ten adults with dyslexia and conducted an online survey with 81 dyslexic and 80 non-dyslexic adults, in which participants described challenges they face in various stages of web search (query formulation, search result triage, and information extraction). We also report the findings of an online study in which 174 adults with dyslexia and 172 without dyslexia rated the readability and relevance of sets of search query results. Our findings demonstrate differences in behaviors and preferences between dyslexic and non-dyslexic searchers, and indicate that factoring readability into search engine rankings and/or interfaces may benefit both dyslexic and non-dyslexic users.
More than 10% of the population has dyslexia, and most are di- agnosed only after they fail in school. This work seeks to change this through early detection via machine learning models that pre- dict dyslexia by observing how people interact with a linguistic computer-based game.We designed items of the game taking into account (i) the empirical linguistic analysis of the errors that peo- ple with dyslexia make, and (ii) specific cognitive skills related to dyslexia: Language Skills, Working Memory, Executive Functions, and Perceptual Processes. . Using measures derived from the game, we conducted an experiment with 267 children and adults in order to train a statistical model that predicts readers with and without dyslexia using measures derived from the game. The model was trained and evaluated in a 10-fold cross experiment, reaching 84.62% accuracy using the most informative features.
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Detecting dyslexia is important because early intervention is key to avoid the negative effects of dyslexia such as school failure. Most of the current approaches to detect dyslexia require expensive personnel (i.e. psychologists) or special hardware (i.e. eye trackers or MRI machines). Also, most of the methods can only be used when children are learning how to read but not before, necessarily delaying needed early intervention. In this work, we present a study with 178 participants speaking different languages (Spanish, German, English, and Catalan) with and without dyslexia using a web-based game built with musical and visual elements that are language independent. The study reveals eighth game measures with significant differences for Spanish children with and without dyslexia, which could be used in future work as a basis for language independent detection. A web- based application like this could have a major impact on children all over the world by easily screening them and suggest the help they need.
In human vision, the brain has to select one view of the world from our two eyes. However, the existence of a clear anatomical asymmetry providing an initial imbalance for normal neural development is still not understood. Using a so-called foveascope, we found that for a cohort of 30 normal adults, the two blue cone-free areas at the centre of the foveas are asymmetrical. The noise-stimulated afterimage dominant eye introduced here corresponds to the circular blue cone-free area, while the non-dominant eye corresponds to the diffuse and irregular elliptical outline. By contrast, we found that this asymmetry is absent or frustrated in a similar cohort of 30 adults with normal ocular status, but with dyslexia, i.e. with visual and phonological deficits. In this case, our results show that the two Maxwell centroid outlines are both circular but lead to an undetermined afterimage dominance with a coexistence of primary and mirror images. The interplay between the lack of asymmetry and the development in the neural maturation of the brain pathways suggests new implications in both fundamental and biomedical sciences. © 2017 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.
Reading is fundamental to interactive-system use, but around 800 million of people might struggle with it due to literacy difficulties. Few websites are designed for high readability, as readability remains an underinvestigated facet of User Experience. Existing readability guidelines have multiple issues: they are too many or too generic, poorly worded, and often lack cognitive grounding. This paper developed a set of 61 readability guidelines in a series of workshops with design and dyslexia experts. A user study with dyslexic and average readers further narrowed the 61-guideline set down to a core set of 12 guidelines -- an acceptably small set to keep in mind while designing. The core-set guidelines address reformatting -- such as using larger fonts and narrower content columns, or avoiding underlining and italics -- and may well aply to the interactive system other than websites.
Current tools for screening dyslexia use linguistic elements, since most dyslexia manifestations are related to difficulties in reading and writing. These tools can only be used with children that have already acquired some reading skills and; sometimes, this detection comes too late to apply proper remediation. In this paper, we propose a method and present DysMusic, a prototype which aims to predict risk of having dyslexia before acquiring reading skills. The prototype was designed with the help of five children and five parents who tested the game using the think aloud protocol and being observed while playing. The advantages of DysMusic are that the approach is language independent and could be used with younger children, i.e., pre-readers.
Intact phonological processing is crucial for successful literacy acquisition. While individuals with difficulties in reading and spelling (i.e., developmental dyslexia) are known to experience deficient phoneme discrimination (i.e., segmental phonology), findings concerning their prosodic processing (i.e., suprasegmental phonology) are controversial. Because there are no behavior-independent studies on the underlying neural correlates of prosodic processing in dyslexia, these controversial findings might be explained by different task demands. To provide an objective behavior-independent picture of segmental and suprasegmental phonological processing in impaired literacy acquisition, we investigated event-related brain potentials during passive listening in typically and poor-spelling German school children. For segmental phonology, we analyzed the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) during vowel length discrimination, capturing automatic auditory deviancy detection in repetitive contexts. For suprasegmental phonology, we analyzed the Closure Positive Shift (CPS) that automatically occurs in response to prosodic boundaries. Our results revealed spelling group differences for the MMN, but not for the CPS, indicating deficient segmental, but intact suprasegmental phonological processing in poor spellers. The present findings point towards a differential role of segmental and suprasegmental phonology in literacy disorders and call for interventions that invigorate impaired literacy by utilizing intact prosody in addition to training deficient phonemic awareness.
Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.
Participants were administered multiple measures of phonological awareness, oral language, and rapid automatized naming at the beginning of kindergarten and multiple measures of word reading at the end of second grade. A structural equation model was fit to the data and latent scores were used to identify children with a deficit in phonological awareness alone or in combination with other kindergarten deficits. Children with a deficit in phonological awareness in kindergarten were found to be 5 times more likely to have dyslexia in second grade than children without such a deficit. This risk ratio substantially increased with the addition of deficits in both oral language and rapid naming. Whereas children with one or more kindergarten deficits were at heighten risk for dyslexia, some of these children were found to be adequate or better readers. These results are discussed within a multifactorial model of dyslexia that includes both risk and protective factors.
In this paper we present a language resource for German, composed of a list of 1,021 unique errors extracted from a collection of texts written by people with dyslexia. The errors were annotated with a set of linguistic characteristics as well as visual and phonetic features. We present the compilation and the annotation criteria for the different types of dyslexic errors. This language resource has many potential uses since errors written by people with dyslexia reflect their difficulties. For instance, it has already been used to design language exercises to treat dyslexia in German. To the best of our knowledge, this is first resource of this kind in German.
The aim of this research is to show that a playful approach combined with music can detect children with dyslexia. Early detection will prevent children from suffering in school until they are detected due to bad grades. Our envisioned web application will contribute to 10% of the population by giving them a chance to succeed in life and find their skills to impress the world.
In this work we introduce the analysis of DysList, a language resource for Spanish composed of a list of unique spelling errors extracted from a collection of texts written by people with dyslexia. Each of the errors was annotated with a set of characteristics as well as with visual and phonetic features. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest resource of this kind in Spanish. We also analyzed all the features of Spanish errors and our main finding is that dyslexic errors are phonetically and visually motivated.
The presentation of a text has a significant effect on the reading speed of people with dyslexia. This paper presents a set of recommendations to customize texts on a computer screen in a more accessible way for this target group. This set is based on an eye tracking study with 92 people, 46 with dyslexia and 46 as control group, where the reading performance of the participants was measured . The following parameters were studied: color combinations for the font and the screen background, font size, column width as well as character, line and paragraph spacings. It was found that larger text and larger character spacings lead the participants with and without dyslexia to read significantly faster . The study is complemented with questionnaires to obtain the participants’ preferences for each of these parameters, finding other significant effects. These results provide evidence that people with dyslexia may benefit from specific text presentation parameters that make text on a screen more readable. So far, these recommendations based on eye tracking data are the most complete for people with dyslexia.
Over two decades of Finnish research, monitoring children born with risk for dyslexia has been carried out in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal Study of Dyslexia (JLD). Two hundred children, half at risk, have been assessed from birth to puberty on hundreds of measures. The aims were to identify measures of prediction of later reading difficulty and to instigate appropriate and earliest diagnosis and intervention. We can identify at-risk children from newborn electroencephalographic brain recordings (Guttorm et al., J Neural Transm 110:1059-1074, 2003). Predictors are also apparent from late-talking infants who have familial background of dyslexia (Lyytinen and Lyytinen, Appl Psycolinguistics 25:397-411, 2004). The earliest easy-to-use predictive measure to identify children who need help to avoid difficulties in learning to read is letter knowledge (Lyytinen et al., Merrill-Palmer Q 52:514-546, 2006). In response, a purpose-engineered computer game, GraphoGame(™), provides an effective intervention tool (Lyytinen et al., Scand J Psychol 50:668-675, 2009). In doubling as a research instrument, GraphoGame provides bespoke intervention/reading instruction for typical/atypically developing children. Used extensively throughout Finland, GraphoGame is now crossing the developed and developing world to assist children, irrespective of the cause (environmental or genetic) of their failing to learn to read (Ojanen et al., Front Psychol 6(671):1-13, 2015).
The ability to read is one of the main skills of a human being. However, some of us have reading difficulties, regardless of social status, level of intelligence or education. This disorder is the main characteristic of dyslexia and is maintained throughout life, requiring early and specialized intervention. Dyslexia is defined as a learning disturbance in the area of reading, writing and spelling. Although the numbers of prevalence rely heavily on the type of investigation conducted, several studies indicate that up to 17% of the world population is dyslexic, and that men have greater prevalence.
Intralingual speech-to-text-conversion is a useful tool for integrating people with hearing impairment in oral communication settings such as councelling interviews or conferences. However, the transfer of speech into written language in real time requires special techniques as it must be very fast and almost 100% correct to be understandable.
The paper introduces and discusses different techniques for intralingual speech-to-text-conversion.
Playing error-based exercises presented in a computer game was found to significantly improve the spelling skills of chil dren with dyslexia in Spanish. Since there are no similar error-based exercises for German, we adapted the method to German and created 2,500 new word exercises. Since dyslexia manifestations are language dependent, the replica tion of the method required (i) collecting new texts written by German children with dyslexia; (ii) the annotation and the linguistic analysis of the errors; and (iii) the creation of exercises as well as their integration in the tool.
In this work-in-progress we present a computer-based method to design German reinforcement exercises for children with dyslexia. From different schools, we collected more than 1,000 errors written by children with dyslexia. Then, we created a classification of dyslexic errors in German and annotated the errors with different language specific features, such as phonetic and visual features. For the creation of the exercises we took into account the linguistic knowledge extracted from the analyses and designed more than 2,500 word exercises in German that have been integrated in a game available for iOS. The game and the resource of dyslexic errors are available online 1 and they are, to the best of our knowledge, the first contributions of this kind for German.
Dyslexia is one of the main cognitive disabilities affecting the reading acquisition. As it may interfere with educa-tional opportunities even in presence of adequate intelligence, it is of crucial importance to obtain early diagnosis and help affected children as soon as possible. Generally, dyslexia is diagnosed not earlier than primary school as difficulties in reading is used as first indicator. Yet, being able to detect and treat this problem even in preschool years would ensure better chances to limit its impact and help the child's future reading ability. To this aim, we discuss here a series of serious games we designed and tested to train specific skills that have been proven to be effective against dyslexia.
Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting reading acquisition. DD cannot be diagnosed before starting the primary school; thereby, one of the main challenges is to obtain an early DD identification even during preschool years. Achieving this goal could help children at risk for DD to limit the impact of this disorder. To this aim, we have created a digital system composed of various serious games designed for predicting the risk of DD in preschoolers and potentially training specific skills impaired in this learning disability. Our set of serious games are designed to be accessible from any device, a computer with mouse and keyboard, but also a tablet with touch interface for younger children.
We present an ebook reader for Android which displays ebooks in a more accessible manner for users with dyslexia. The ebook reader combines features that other related tools already have, such as text-to-speech technology, and new features, such as displaying the text with an adapted text layout based on the results of a user study with participants with dyslexia. Since there is no universal profile of a user with dyslexia, the layout settings are customizable and users can override the special layout setting according to their reading preferences.
This work studies the experiences, challenges, and strategies of people with dyslexia when using social media. We interviewed 11 people with dyslexia to understand their gen- eral experiences with reading and writing content on Facebook. The interview study findings highlight the challenges they face when writing content on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), and their strategies for mitigating these challenges. Following up on this, we surveyed 492 participants, among whom 67 self-reported as having dyslexia. The survey results confirm challenges with and strategies for writing unique to people with dyslexia, although they also suggest that better writing support on SNSs may be more broadly beneficial.
Standards organizations, (e.g., the World Wide Web Consortium), are placing increased importance on the cognitive accessibility of online systems, including web search. Previous work has shown an association between query-document relevance judgments, and query-independent assessments of document readability. In this paper we study the lexical and aesthetic features of web documents that may underlie this relationship. Leveraging a data set consisting of relevance and readability judgments for 200 web pages as assessed by 174 adults with dyslexia and 172 adults without dyslexia, we answer the following research questions: (1) Which web page features are most associated with readability? (2) To what extent are these features also associated with relevance? And, (3) are any features associated with the differences in readability/relevance judgments observed between dyslexic and non-dyslexic populations? Our findings have implications for improving the cognitive accessibility of search systems and web documents.
Warum haben ca. 5% der Grundschulkinder trotz normaler Begabung und ausreichendem Schulunterricht erhebliche Schwierigkeiten beim Erlernen des Lesens und Schreibens? Wodurch ist eine solche Lese- Rechtschreibstörung gekennzeichnet, wie wirkt sie sich im Schulalltag und im späteren Leben aus? Wie kann man die Lese-Rechtschreibstörung möglichst früh diagnostizieren und wie kann man die betroffenen Kinder optimal fördern? Dies sind zentrale Fragen, die in diesem Buch auf der Basis des aktuellen Standes der internationalen Forschung behandelt werden.
Zunächst wird die unbeeinträchtigte Entwicklung der Schriftsprache dargestellt, eine wichtige Grundlage für das Verständnis der Lese-Rechtschreibstörung. Danach wird das Erscheinungsbild der Lese-Rechtschreibstörung ausführlich beschrieben sowie die klinische Klassifikation erläutert und kritisch diskutiert. Im Anschluss werden verschiedene wissenschaftlich begründete Ansätze zu Ursachen der Lese- Rechtschreibstörung besprochen. Das bis dahin vermittelte Wissen bildet das Fundament für die Auseinandersetzung mit eher anwendungsbezogenen Fragen zur Diagnostik und Förderung: Kann man ein Risiko für Lese-Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten bereits im Vorschulalter feststellen? Welche Verfahren werden für die Diagnostik der Lese-Rechtschreibstörung eingesetzt? Kann man der Entstehung von Lese-Rechtschreibschwierigkeiten vorbeugen? Welche Ansätze zur Intervention gibt es und welche sind besonders vielversprechend?
Die Zielgruppen
Studierende der Fachrichtungen (Schul-)Psychologie, Logopädie und Patholinguistik sowie Lehramtsstudenten und alle, die sich beruflich mit der Thematik auseinandersetzen, insbesondere Lehrer, Schulpsychologen, Psychologen, Lerntherapeuten, Erzieher, Psychotherapeuten, Kinder- und Jugendpsychiater sowie der interessierte Laie.
Die Autoren
Priv.-Doz. Dr. habil. Claudia Steinbrink ist Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Lehrstuhl für Kognitive und Entwicklungspsychologie der Technischen Universität Kaiserslautern. Schwerpunkte ihrer Lehre sind schulbezogene Themen der Entwicklungs- und Pädagogischen Psychologie. Den Schwerpunkt ihrer Forschung bilden grundlagenwissenschaftliche wie anwendungsbezogene Projekte zu kognitiven Grundlagen der Schriftsprachentwicklung und der Lese-Rechtschreibstörung.
Prof. Dr. habil. Thomas Lachmann ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Kognitive und Entwicklungspsychologie und Leiter des Fernstudiengangs Psychologie kindlicher Lern- und Entwicklungsauffälligkeiten an der Technischen Universität Kaiserslautern. Zusammen mit seiner Arbeitsgruppe arbeitet er an der experimentellen Erforschung der Entwicklung kognitiver Funktionen, insbesondere der neuro-kognitiven Grundlagen des Schriftspracherwerbs und der Lese- Rechtschreibstörung.
Approximately 4–10% of the German population suffers from developmental dyslexia. The learning disorder afffects educational, personal, and social development of children in a negative way. Mobile serious games have the potential to support dyslexic primary-school children in addition to school support and learning therapy. We propose such a mobile serious game called “Prosodiya”, with the help of which dyslexic children can improve their reading and writing performance. Prosodiya includes innovative and evidence-based interventions that focus on improving the awareness of linguistic features related to syllable stress. We report the results of a pilot study of a preliminary version of the game. Results indicate that the children enjoyed playing the game, that their motivation was maintained, and that they wanted more levels.
The use of colors to enhance the reading of people with dyslexia have been broadly discussed and is often recommended, but evidence of the effectiveness of this approach is lacking. This paper presents a user study with 341 participants (89 with dyslexia) that measures the effect of using background colors on screen readability. Readability was measured via reading time and distance travelled by the mouse. Comprehension was used as a control variable. The results show that using certain background colors have a significant impact on people with and without dyslexia. Warm background colors, Peach, Orange and Yellow, significantly improved reading performance over cool background colors, Blue, Blue Grey and Green. These results provide evidence to the practice of using colored backgrounds to improve readability; people with and without dyslexia benefit, but people with dyslexia may especially benefit from the practice given the difficulty they have in reading in general.
In this demo we present DytectiveU, a game with 35,000 exercises to train the cognitive abilities related to dyslexia. To personalize the exercises, the game takes into consideration 25 indicators grouped in performance measures, language skills, working memory, executive functions and perceptual processes. The main contribution of this approach is to train dyslexia from a holistic point of view addressing not only the difficulties in reading and writing but also other cognitive abilities that are related to dyslexia and/or contribute to create coping skills to overcome dyslexia. The game is available for Android, iOS and Web (PC/Mac).
Previous research has shown that speech-to-text (STT) software can support students in producing a given piece of writing. This is the 1st study to investigate the use of STT to teach a writing strategy. We pretested 45 Grade 5 students on argument writing and trained them to use STT. Students participated in 4 lessons on an argument writing strategy and wrote a practice text for each lesson. We then randomly assigned the students to compose practice texts in 1 of 2 modalities: handwriting or STT. Students then completed posttests on argument writing in both modalities. Both modality conditions resulted in statistically significant, large gains in text quality, word count, and variety of argument moves and significant transfer to the untrained modality. The modalities did not differ significantly in their effects on argument writing or cognitive load. The results suggest that STT provides an alternative medium for learning writing strategies.
The goal of the DYSL-X project is to develop a tool to predict whether a preschooler (5 yrs) shows high risks for developing dyslexia. This tool is a tablet game that incorporates tests to take specific performance measures that allow for this prediction. The game will thus serve as an assessment tool to be used in school psychology services and clinical diagnostic and rehabilitation centers. In order to design the optimal tablet game for preschoolers, during the first phase of the projects several existing games for preschoolers were evaluated in order to derive design guidelines for games targeted at preschoolers. These design guidelines are presented in this paper and next, we show how these guidelines were used to develop the final game of the DYSL-X project.
Poor spelling is a challenge faced by people with dyslexia throughout their lives. Spellcheckers are therefore a crucial tool for people with dyslexia, but current spellcheckers do not detect real-word errors, which are a common type of errors made by people with dyslexia. Real-word errors are spelling mistakes that result in an unintended but real word, for instance, form instead of from. Nearly 20% of the errors that people with dyslexia make are real-word errors. In this paper, we introduce a system called Real Check that uses a probabilistic language model, a statistical dependency parser and Google n-grams to detect real-world errors. We evaluated Real Check on text written by people with dyslexia, and showed that it detects more of these errors than widely used spellcheckers. In an experiment with 34 people (17 with dyslexia), people with dyslexia corrected sentences more accurately and in less time with Real Check.
DIESEL-X is a computer game that was developed to detect a high risk for developing dyslexia in preschoolers. The game includes three mini-games that test the player on three skills that are considered to yield outcome measures that predict the onset of dyslexia: the detection threshold of frequency modulated tones, a test on phonological awareness in which the player has to identify words that have the same phonetic ending, and a test on letter knowledge. In order to keep the motivation of the player high during testing, these tests are embedded in a computer game. We discuss the participatory design process that was adopted to design and develop the game, the rationale behind the design decisions, and we describe the resulting games. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. All rights reserved.
Around 10% of the people have dyslexia, a neurological disability that impairs a person's ability to read and write. There is evidence that the presentation of the text has a significant effect on a text's accessibility for people with dyslexia. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no experiments that objectively measure the impact of the typeface (font) on screen reading performance. In this article, we present the first experiment that uses eye-tracking to measure the effect of typeface on reading speed. Using a mixed between-within subject design, 97 subjects (48 with dyslexia) read 12 texts with 12 different fonts. Font types have an impact on readability for people with and without dyslexia. For the tested fonts, sans serif, monospaced, and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional, and italic fonts. On the basis of our results, we recommend a set of more accessible fonts for people with and without dyslexia.
This paper reviews the main challenges of studying dyslexia for web accessibility. These are: (1) measuring the impact of dyslexia in the population; (2) the limitations of the up-to-date studies; and (3) including dyslexia in the Web accessibility guidelines. While some aspects are already addressed by the guidelines, we propose the inclusion of simple recommendations for typeface and font size that would benefit both people with and without dyslexia. We also suggest a change in the current methodologies to overcome up-to-date research limitations using larger and more representative datasets.
A single-subject alternating treatment design was used to investigate the extent to which a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, impacted reading rate or accuracy compared to two commonly used fonts when used with elementary students identified as having dyslexia. OpenDyslexic was compared to Arial and Times New Roman in three reading tasks: (a) letter naming, (b) word reading, and (c) nonsense word reading. Data were analyzed through visual analysis and improvement rate difference, a nonparametric measure of nonoverlap for comparing treatments. Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that the font was "new" or "different", none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font.
The Web is an essential resource widely used by many organizations, affecting the lives of countless people. Thus, it is essential to ensure that Websites are accessible in order for people with disabilities to enjoy all its benefits. Many studies have been dedicated to investigate Web accessibility issues for users with visual or motor disabilities. However, comparatively fewer studies have addressed accessibility for users with specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia. Furthermore, few tools provide support for dyslexic users during reading and browsing in Web content. The present study involved the design and implementation of a prototype extension for a Web browser that offers customization features of Web pages, based on requirements from problems encountered by users with dyslexia in related studies in the literature. The research involved the design, implementation and a preliminary user evaluation involving users with dyslexia in two iterative cycles. The implemented prototype included features to adjust layout characteristics of text and other features identified by means of feedback from users to aid concentration and dealing with difficult words, such as a “reading ruler”. The results obtained from this study highlighted the importance of providing further support in user agents to help dyslexic users and provide tools to help with linguistic issues.
In this paper we present a method which aims to improve the spelling of
children with dyslexia through playful and targeted exercises. In contrast to
previous approaches, our method does not use correct words or positive examples
to follow, but presents the child a misspelled word as an exercise to solve. We
created these training exercises on the basis of the linguistic knowledge
extracted from the errors found in texts written by children with dyslexia. To
test the effectiveness of this method in Spanish, we integrated the exercises
in a game for iPad, DysEggxia (Piruletras in Spanish), and carried out a
within-subject experiment. During eight weeks, 48 children played either
DysEggxia or Word Search, which is another word game. We conducted tests and
questionnaires at the beginning of the study, after four weeks when the games
were switched, and at the end of the study. The children who played DysEggxia
for four weeks in a row had significantly less writing errors in the tests that
after playing Word Search for the same time. This provides evidence that
error-based exercises presented in a tablet help children with dyslexia improve
their spelling skills.
In this paper we present the evaluation of DysWebxia, a reading app for iOS devices, specially designed for people with dyslexia. DysWebxia integrates previous results about the best way to present text for people with dyslexia together with a unique feature, the ability to show synonyms on demand for complex words. Although the new algorithm used for this unique feature is language independent, our first prototype is for Spanish. To evaluate DysWebxia we carried out two different user studies. One to evaluate the quality of the synonyms on demand that included 32 participants with dyslexia and 38 strong readers without dyslexia, and another one to evaluate the usability of the app based on 12 participants. Our results show that the quality of the synonyms generated by the new algorithm outperforms a frequency based baseline, and that the participants found DysWebxia very usable. Therefore, we show that this app may have in the future a large impact for people with dyslexia.
We present a user study for two different automatic strategies that simplify text content for people with dyslexia. The strategies considered are the standard one (replacing a complex word with the most simpler synonym) and a new one that presents several synonyms for a complex word if the user requests them. We compare texts transformed by both strategies with the original text and to a gold standard manually built. The study was undertook by 96 participants, 47 with dyslexia plus a control group of 49 people without dyslexia. To show device independence, for the new strategy we used three different reading devices. Overall, participants with dyslexia found texts presented with the new strategy significantly more readable and comprehensible. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest user study of its kind.
Even if dyslexia is neurological in origin, certain text modifications could make texts more accessible for people with dyslexia. We introduce DysWebxia 2.0, a model that integrates our findings from research conducted with this target group. It alters content and presentation of the text to make it more readable. We also present the current integrations of DysWebxia in different reading software applications.