Facilita

Abstract

Texts are the media content primarily available on Web sites and applications. However, this heavy use of texts creates an accessibility barrier to those who cannot read fluently in their mother tongue due to both text length and linguistic complexity. To offer an accessible alternative to these readers, shorter and simplified versions of text content should be provided. Taking that into consideration, this paper introduces Facilita, an assistive technology to help lowerliteracy users to understand the text content of Web applications. Facilita generates an accessible content from Web pages automatically, using summarization and simplification techniques. It is also important to consider interface design requirements, since Facilita's target audience (the functionally illiterate) is often classified as computer illiterate as well. Thus, interaction and user interface design were developed considering the limitations and skills of the functionally illiterate.

Iterative Edit-Based Unsupervised Sentence Simplification

“…Sentence simplification is relevant in various real-world and downstream applications. For instance, it can benefit people with autism (Evans et al, 2014), dyslexia (Rello et al, 2013), and low-literacy skills (Watanabe et al, 2009). It can also serve as a preprocessing step to improve parsers (Chandrasekar et al, 1996) and summarization systems (Klebanov et al, 2004).…”

Automatic Text Simplification for Social Good: Progress and Challenges

“…The FACILITA system was envisioned with the focus on summarization and syntactic simplification, i.e. sentence splitting, change of discourse markers, conversion from passive to active voice, inversion of clause order, subject-verb-object order, topicalization and de-topicalization (Watanabe et al, 2009). Educational FACILITA was a web application prototype which offered lexical elaborations and named entity labelling.…”

Text Simplification using Hybrid Semantic Compression and Support Vector Machine for Troll Threat Sentences

“…Study by [2] highlights that text simplification tasks encompass several operations, including theoretical simplification to streamline content and structure, elaborate modification to clarify key points, and text summarization to remove peripheral or irrelevant information. The primary goal of text simplification is to enhance the accessibility of information for individuals with disabilities [3][4], those with low literacy levels [5][6], and non-native speakers [7].…”