Comfort Reading

Accessible documents with a personalised look for people who are unable to read.

 

Type of project: Prototype

Disabilities concerned: Visual disability (visually impaired people with sufficient remaining vision to read enlarged characters), any other sensory disability or cognitive disorder that has an impact on reading ability (particularly dyslexia).

Topics: Leisure, Education, Work

Status: Completed

 

Our aim is to produce a prototype that will enable users to customise the visual presentation of digital documents to make them easier to read.

 

The LireConfort project has developed a prototype for personalising digital documents to meet the needs and reading preferences of visually impaired and dyslexic people.

In practice, the prototype has been implemented on the MonaLira online digital media library (www.monalira.org). It can now be used to customise the visual appearance of more than 30,000 books.

Before downloading the book, visually impaired or dyslexic users can choose the settings that will enable them to consult the document as comfortably as possible:

  • Type of font (Luciole, Lexie Readble, Arial, Open Dyslexic, Verdana, etc.)
  • Font size
  • Text colour and background colour
  • Spacing between lines, words and characters
  • Syllabic colouring
  • Format of reading material (A4, A5, A6, etc.)

The organisation of face-to-face working groups involving visually impaired and dyslexic people enabled us to validate the relevance of the approach adopted, which consisted of personalising the documents before downloading so that they could be easily consulted on different devices (PC/Mac, tablets, smartphones, etc.). It was particularly instructive to note that dyslexic people were often unaware of the existence of specific fonts to compensate for their reading difficulties, and did not realise the positive impact that certain settings (such as changing the line spacing or the space between words) could have on their ability to decipher text.

A cup of coffee is placed next to an open book.

Contact

Céline Witschard

celine.witschard@pleinacces.org

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