Accessible Texts for Autism

Abstract

Images are widely used in automatic text simplification systems, Picture Exchange Communication Systems (PECS) and humanproduced easy-read documents, in order to make text more accessible for people with various types of disabilities, including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). People with ASD are known to experience difficulties in reading comprehension, as well as to have unusual attention patterns, which makes the development of user-centred tools for this population a challenging task. This paper presents the first study to use eye-tracking technology with ASD participants in order to evaluate text documents. Its aim is twofold. First, it evaluates the use of images in texts and provides evidence of a significant difference in the attention patterns of participants with and without autism, with the autistic participants focusing on images more than the non-autistic ones. Sets of two types of images, photographs and symbols, are compared to establish which ones are more useful to include in simple documents. Second, the study evaluates human-produced easyread documents, as a gold standard for accessible documents, on 20 adults with autism. The results provide an understanding of the perceived level of difficulty of easy-read documents according to this population, as well as the preferences of autistic individuals in text presentation. The results are synthesized as set of guidelines for creating accessible text for autism.

Detecting High-Functioning Autism in Adults Using Eye Tracking and Machine Learning

“…In most cases, adding variables such as AOI ID and whether or not the AOI contained the correct answer for the Search task decreased the prediction accuracy. Again, no clear pattern was observed with regards to page visual complexity (Table IV), which was consistent with fndings in [29]. The Gender variable generally lowered the results.…”

“…This fnding indicates that the visual processing of web pages, without the interference of a specifc task, works differently in the two groups. The signifcance of this goes beyond the task of automatic autism detection, as it implies that people with autism may scan the elements of a web page in a different order or be drawn to specifc elements (e.g., images) more than other elements (e.g., text), as suggested by [29]. Further analysis will be needed to confrm this.…”

“…Exploring web pages is also a highly familiar and naturalistic task for many people, which is important, as using data from everyday tasks has the potential to unveil differences that could be captured by means which are independent of laboratory equipment. Adult people with autism are also known to focus for longer on images in textand-image pairs compared to controls [22]. For web pages, the scanpaths of viewers with autism have been shown to exhibit higher variance [23].…”

Autism and the web

“…This phenomenon is known as "stimulus overselectivity" (Lovaas and Schreibman, 1971) or "tunnel vision" (Ploog, 2010). These differences in attention are known to affect the way some people with autism process images in text documents, whereby they would focus on the image significantly longer than control-group participants (Yaneva, Temnikova and Mitkov, 2015). Another study reports that the lexical properties of words have an effect on different durations of the viewing time per word in autistic and neurotypical readers (Stajner et al, 2017).…”

Accessible and UsableWebsites and Mobile Applications for People with Autism Spectrum Disorders: a Comparative Study

“…paper [39] presents the first study to use eye-tracking technology with a set of adult users with ASD, in order to evaluate text documents with specific features, and it provides specific guidelines for creating accessible text for autism. The text was combined with photographs and symbols.…”