Roberto Carlini

Size matters (spacing not): 18 points for a dyslexic-friendly Wikipedia

In 2012, Wikipedia was the sixth-most visited website on the Internet. Being one of the main repositories of knowledge, students from all over the world consult it. But, around 10% of these students have dyslexia, which impairs their access to text-based websites. How could Wikipedia be presented to be more readable for this target group? In an experiment with 28 participants with dyslexia, we compare reading speed, comprehension, and subjective readability for the font sizes 10, 12, 14, 18, 22, and 26 points, and line spacings 0.8, 1.0, 1.4, and 1.8. The results show that font size has a significant effect on the readability and the understandability of the text, while line spacing does not. On the basis of our results, we recommend using 18-point font size when designing web text for readers with dyslexia. Our results significantly differ from previous recommendations, presumably, because this is the first work to cover a wide range of values and to study them in the context of an actual website.

DysWebxia 2.0!: more accessible text for people with dyslexia

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.

Semantics-driven recognition of collocations using word embeddings

L2 learners often produce “ungrammatical” word combinations such as, e.g., *give a suggestion or *make a walk. This is because of the “collocationality” of one of their items (the base) that limits the acceptance of collocates to express a specific meaning (‘perform’ above). We propose an algorithm that delivers, for a given base and the intended meaning of a collocate, the actual collocate lexeme(s) (make / take above). The algorithm exploits the linear mapping between bases and collocates from examples and generates a collocation transformation matrix which is then applied to novel unseen cases. The evaluation shows a promising line of research in collocation discovery.

A plug-in to aid online reading in Spanish

Reading text on the Web is a challenging task for many people, such as those with cognitive impairments, reading difficulties or people who are learning a new language. In this paper we present a web browser plug-in to help with reading Spanish text on the Web. The plug-in is freely available for Chrome and presents definitions and simpler synonyms on demand for the selected web text. The tool was modified following the suggestions of 5 people (2 with diagnosed dyslexia) who tested the tool using the think aloud protocol and undertook a subsequent interview.