Re: Easy Read UK

One of the first things that jumped out of me is that this is a British 
company, so that means their use of "learning disabilities" needs to be 
interpreted using the British definition. In Britain, LDs do not include 
specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia or dyscalculia but 
instead refer to more general/more severe learning difficulties: autism, 
Down syndrome, fetal alcohol syndrome, etc. In the US, we often call 
these intellectual disabilities.

 From the looks of what they are doing, it's a mixture of text 
simplification and structuring to promote access/memory. I do have some 
references on text simplification, including articles from education 
sciences. The basic idea of text simplification is sound: we can readily 
create markers/measurements (syllables, clause structures, sentence 
length, etc.) that correlate with a notion of sentence complexity. And 
there are studies showing that simpler texts are easier to read (faster, 
less errors)... but... it all comes down to how the simplification is 
performed (by hand? by computer? customized to the reader?). In practice 
(and this means in K-12), a lot of the text simplification for reading 
issues are done by hand per student.

As for restructuring text to aid memory/comprehension, there is 
certainly literature on the subject. Hypermedia is based on this central 
idea that providing semantic structure aids in memory. This concept, 
called the fan effect, says that memory is aided by breaking information 
into smaller, connected chunks. It's less clear how well this concept 
applies to static, non-linked text. There was a bit of research on this 
in the 70s/80s, such as seeing if paragraph breaks could speed up 
instruction set comprehension (it did to some degree). For various 
speculated reasons, a lot of reading research has avoided looking at 
typographical impact, but I have seen some revitalization of the topic. 
Mary Dyson of Reading University has done some studies of how we react 
to basic typographical structure. One reference I do not have on hand 
reveals that we expect line breaks on average every 60-70 characters. 
Another of her studies looked at text layout and reading comprehension 
questions in a testing scenario. I'll do my best tomorrow to grab some 
PDFs of these papers if I can (easier to do at work than from home).

Of course, all of this stuff is in regards to the average reader and not 
one with a disability that impacts reading. Text structure might help 
some reading tasks even in people with low visual memory. The 
recommendation to use ragged right instead of full justification is 
based on the idea that the jaggedness provides enough differences to 
help locate your eye when moving from line to line. Sadly, this has not 
been investigated much in research settings. At least for that, if 
anyone is interested, I can explain partially why such research has not 
been done in regards to reading disability research has not explored the 
topic.


Kate Deibel, PhD

URL:      http://staff.washington.edu/deibel

--

"To make a difference, one must subtract one number from another."

On 2014-11-02 11:24 AM, lisa.seeman wrote:
> It is an interesting link. However we have resolved to look at
> accessibility for information and services etc. Not at learning
> methodologies.
> Clearly there is an overlap, but we need to be careful to seperate out
> from learning methodologies what we can consider accessibility advice.
>
> My 2 cents - speaking just as a member, Many dyslexics, such as myself,
> (although not all) have a very impaired visual memory (if I have one at
> all) and techniques like this will not help at all.
>
> All the best
>
> Lisa Seeman
>
> Athena ICT Accessibility Projects <http://accessibility.athena-ict.com>
> LinkedIn <http://il.linkedin.com/in/lisaseeman/>, Twitter
> <https://twitter.com/SeemanLisa>
>
>
>
>
> ---- On Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:53:07 +0200
> *Rochford<john.rochford@umassmed.edu>* wrote ----
>
>     Hi Lisa and All,
>
>     Easy Read Online (ERO) is the UK organization I had referenced
>     during one of our teleconferences. Its website says it creates
>     easy-to-read documents for people with learning disabilities
>     (intellectual disabilities).
>
>     See http://www.easy-read-online.co.uk/
>
>     I could not immediately find any references to information that the
>     techniques ERO employs are evidence-based or empirically-tested.
>
>     While looking for ERO, I stumbled upon “EasyRead”, by Oxford
>     Learning Solutions, another UK organization. Its product is designed
>     for people with learning disabilities (Dyslexia, etc.). Its home
>     page references:
>
>     ·a “… research-based approach …”;
>
>     ·empirical testing with “… thousands of children …”; and
>
>     ·a link to results from “Randomized Control Trials”
>
>     See http://www.easyreadsystem.com/
>
>     John
>
>     John Rochford
>     UMass Medical School/E.K. Shriver Center
>     Director, INDEX Program
>     Instructor, Family Medicine & Community Health
>     <http://www.disabilityinfo.org/>http://www.DisabilityInfo.org
>     Twitter: @ClearHelper
>
>
>

Received on Monday, 3 November 2014 02:36:25 UTC