Tools and Resources for People with REAding DIfficulties (READI)

With the growth of educational technologies, several innovative technology applications and resources are devoted to how to foster improvement in student learning to read. In addition, a number of assistive technologies for reading have appeared in the last decades, i.e. “devices and services that enhance the performance of individuals with a disability by enabling them to complete tasks more effectively, efficiently, and independently than otherwise possible” (Blackhurst, 1997). The field of special education has had a longstanding interest in technology and the potential it holds for individuals with language/speech disabilities, cognitive disorders, etc. (Edyburn, 2000). In this context, this workshop aims to present current state-of-the-art applications and approaches addressed to a variety of populations and contexts to enhance reading.

While proposing current research on technology-enhanced reading, we would like to widen the perspective of the workshop for ‘field’ professionals (teachers and educators, speech-language pathologists, etc.). The workshop will thus address topics concerning specialized technology, tools, and resources, how they serve specific individuals or processes (i.e., learning to read, reading, comprehending), the impact of the devices on their lives and activities, etc. In the light of recent advances in AI, we would like to bring to the fore innovative works from research to applications in fieldwork.

The workshop aims to address the issue from a variety of domains and languages, including education, natural language processing, linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive sciences, psychophysics of vision, etc. The focus will be on target populations struggling with learning to read, or with decoding, or with comprehending, etc. such as illiterates, aphasic or dyslexic readers, deaf or hard of hearing, low vision or visually impaired readers, people with autism or speech/language disorders, etc. to name a few. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Measuring and evaluating readability and text complexity
• Models, corpora, lexicons for text adaptation
• Text adaptation approaches for target audiences
• Meaning representation and multimodal text adaptation
• Text generation of adapted contents
• Educational devices and/or smart technologies for reading:
• serious games for improving reading comprehension skills
• text-to-speech applications
• decoding training applications to strengthen early reading skills
• booklets with lexical resources to look up unknown words
• graded materials for adaptive learning
• ...
• ...