Attention‐driven read‐aloud technology increases reading comprehension in children with reading disabilities

Abstract

The paper presents the design of an assistive reading tool that integrates read-aloud technology with eye-tracking to regulate the speed of reading and support struggling readers in following the text while listening to it. The paper describes the design rationale of this approach, following the theory of auditory-visual integration, in terms of an automatic self-adaptable technique based on the reader's gaze that provides an individualized interaction experience. This tool has been assessed in a controlled experiment with 20 children (aged 8-10 years) with a diagnosis of dyslexia and a control group of 20 children with typical reading abilities. The results show that children with reading difficulties improved their comprehension scores by 24% measured on a standardized instrument for the assessment of reading comprehension, and that children with more inaccurate reading (N=9) tended to benefit more.The findings are discussed in terms of a better integration between audio and visual text information, paving the way to improve standard read-aloud technology with gaze-contingency and self-adaptable techniques to personalize the reading experience.

Influence of assistive technology applications on dyslexic students: The case of Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…These studies unanimously agree on the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and well-being of children with disabilities and their families, especially those with developmental dyslexia, and they recommend providing and supporting conscious post-disaster trauma treatment practices. Several researchers (Buele et al, 2020 ; Schiavo et al, 2021 ; Aldabaybah & Jusoh, 2018 ) have stated that these practices can be introduced intensively and consciously by transferring traditional learning strategies to applications and digital environments. Considering the features of these applications that support audiovisual learning (McNicholl et al, 2020 ; Schmitt et al, 2019 ), this study was conducted to employ the potential features and characteristics of AT applications to support students with dyslexia in developing their reading skills by improving VP and PhP.…”

Investigating Issues and Needs of Dyslexic Students at University: Proof of Concept of an Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality-Based Supporting Platform and Preliminary Results

“…A further advance has been made with the introduction of specific and sophisticated tools aimed at increasing the impaired skills. For example, in the work of [59], using a computer platform equipped with speech synthesis and eye tracking was a great boost to the comprehension of a text by dyslexic subjects. Several works have explored the use of AI, demonstrating that it is likely to be one of the most effective instruments to face the problem.…”

“…This fact highlights the necessity to combine both supporting methodologies in order to be capable of helping dyslexic students during their academic career. Conversely, the vast majority of approaches proposed until now [56][57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65] have only taken into account digital tools, neglecting to also create, in parallel, a list of the best practices to be followed to provide support to dyslexic students. The supporting strategies that obtained the highest scores are taking pauses during lessons, hosting lessons online, repeating the studied material and making the program and the slides of the course available, which are considered useful by about 96 to 99% of the participants in the questionnaire.…”

Text‐to‐speech applications to reduce mind wandering in students with dyslexia

“…Despite increasing evidence on the benefit of text-to-speech on reading comprehension, however, the underlying cognitive mechanisms supported by such technology remain largely unknown (Schiavo et al, 2021). According to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (Mayer, 2014), for instance, integrating cross-channel representations (e.g., auditory/visual) of the same stimulus (e.g., a written word) is supposed to help the reader overcome the capacity limitations of the cognitive system when accessing material to be learned.…”

“…In this view, multimodal (i.e., auditory-visual) text presentation through text-tospeech software may help readers with dyslexia mitigate visual distraction due to their high sensitivity to crowding, which is supposed to impair letter identification in the periphery, thus reducing reading speed by limiting the number of letters able to be perceived at a glance (Pelli et al, 2007;Schneps et al, 2019). In addition, it has been recently suggested that the ability of text-to-speech software to highlight words can also improve verbal and visual information processing in working memory, increasing the mental resources that can be devoted to comprehension (Schiavo et al, 2021).…”