Cognitive Web Accessibility: Readability 2013

Corpus-based Sentence Deletion and Split Decisions for Spanish Text Simplification
"This study addresses the automatic simplification of texts in Spanish in order to make them more accessible to people with cognitive disabilities. A corpus analysis of original and manually simplified news articles was undertaken in order to identify and quantify relevant operations to be implemented in a text simplification system. The articles were further compared at sentence and text level by means of automatic feature extraction and various machine learning classification algorithms, using three different groups of features (POS frequencies, syntactic information, and text complexity measures) with the aim of identifying features that help separate original documents from their simple equivalents. Finally, it was investigated whether these features can be used to decide upon simplification operations to be carried out at the sentence level (split, delete, and reduce)."
Comparing Resources for Spanish Lexical Simplification
"In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguation. We present a novel evaluation framework in lexical simplification that takes into account the level of ambiguity of the word to be simplified. The evaluation compares various instances of the lexical simplification system, a gold standard, and a baseline. On the basis of our results we recommend different resources and word sense disambiguation methods depending on the ambiguity level of the target word to be simplified."
Do People with Dyslexia Need Special Reading Software?
" In this paper we analyze the textual parameters that impact dyslexic reading and compare them with the features of the current reading tools, specialized or not. Our main conclusion is that people with dyslexia are an example to support universal accessibility: the inclusion of their needs match the usability requirements of all other readers. Most of the dyslexic needs are covered through the customization of the text in existing generic reading tools, but to cover all the requirements, specialized software is needed. "
One Half or 50%? An Eye-Tracking Study of Number Representation Readability
"Are numbers expressed as digits easier to read and understand than written with letters? What about fractions and percentages? Exact or rounded values? We present an eye-tracking study that attempts to answer these questions for Spanish, using fixation and reading time to measure readability as well as comprehension questions to score understandability. We find that digits are faster to read but do not help comprehension. Fractions help understandability while percentages help readability. No significant results were found concerning the influence of rounding. Our experiments were performed by 72 persons, half of them with dyslexia. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that addresses the cognitive load of number representation in any language, even more for people with dyslexia"
Frequent Words Improve Readability and Short Words Improve Understandability for People with Dyslexia
"In an experiment with 46 people, 23 with dyslexia and 23 as a control group, we compare texts where words were substituted by shorter/longer and more/less frequent synonyms. Using more frequent words caused the participants with dyslexia to read significantly faster, while the use of shorter words caused them to understand the text better. Amongst the control group, no significant effects were found. These results provide evidence that people with dyslexia may benefit from interactive tools that perform lexical simplification."
An iOS Reader for People with Dyslexia
"We present DysWebxia, an eBook reader for iOS which modifies the form and the content of the text. This tool is specifi cally designed for people with dyslexia according to previous research with this target group. The settings are customizable depending on the reading preferences."
Good Fonts for Dyslexia
"In this paper, we present the first experiment that uses eye-tracking to measure the effect of font type on reading speed. Using a within-subject design, 48 subjects with dyslexia read 12 texts with 12 different 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 present a set of more accessible fonts for people with dyslexia."
Clustering cliques for graph-based summarization of the biomedical research literature
"Graph-based notions are increasingly used in biomedical data mining and knowledge discovery tasks. In this paper, we present a clique-clustering method to automatically summarize graphs of semantic predications produced from PubMed citations (titles and abstracts)."
Balancing Text for better readability
Adobe Web Platform Team Blog's discussion of current solutions for balancing text, why they don't work well on the web and a proposal for automatic text balancing on the web by using "a text rendering algorithm that would be applied by browser when asked by the designer to do so to automatically balance text across multiple lines".
Hybrid ontology based e - Learning expert system for children with Autism
"By Semantically enabling the Computer Aided Instructional (CAI) content one could bring in intelligence into the e-Learning applications for Persons with Cognitive Disabilities. An e-Learning system with semantic based content extraction mechanism is proposed which uses Hybrid Ontologies that are specifically evolved for teaching children with Autism. Annotation of content with extended properties such as disability, learning styles and pedagogy, enables the e-Learning system to become user-aware. The proposed system is an adaptable e-Learning system, based on a hybrid ontology that was drawn from disability based domain knowledge and the associated teaching methodologies. This intelligent system adapts to the user's learning needs by facilitating the user with suitable learning content based on his capabilities as brought out in his Individualized Educational Programmes (IEPs)."
An arabic ontology-based learning system for children with intellectual challenges
"Children with intellectual challenges (IC) are growing up with extensive exposure to computer technology." "This paper proposes an assistive education system that dynamically generates multimedia tutorials for children with IC in the state of Qatar. We use several techniques to generate the tutorials which include: Arabic text processing, entities relationship extraction, multimedia-based ontology, and online retrieval of multimedia contents."
Personal learning environment for disabled People
"This paper presents a Personal Learning Environment for People with Disabilities, a system that adapts information display in an e-learning environment, according to characteristics and difficulties of a student with mild cognitive disabilities. The Personal Learning Environment for People with Disabilities includes a neural network to classify disability type (sensory orcognitive), which becomes a base to build virtual environments that can adapt and personalize information to students, taking into account their context and profile."