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Building Better Reading - Agenda - Track 1

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Building Better Reading - Published Papers

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Building Better Reading - Agenda - Skoll World Forum 2022

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Building Better Reading - Resources - Skoll World Forum 2022

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Readability Ecosystem Experts in Session - Skoll World Forum 2022

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"Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach" is now available on arXiv!

"Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach" is now available on arXiv, an archival preprint service. Twenty-eight different authors - from around the world and across many disciplines - collaborated to author a 60+ page intro to Readability research toward the goal of accelerating best practices and methodologies.

The authors welcome your suggestions on this preprint while the paper is in review.

A special thanks to Dr. Zoya Bylinskii for her vision and leadership in producing this collaborative work and to the editorial team, Zoya along with Dr. Ben Sawyer and Dr. Benjamin Wolfe.

The full paper is available here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09615

Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Sofie Beier, Sam Berlow, Esat Boucaud, Zoya Bylinskii, Tianyuan Cai, Jenae Cohn, Kathy Crowley, Stephanie L. Day, Tilman Dingler, Jonathan Dobres, Jennifer Healey, Rajiv Jain, Marjorie Jordan, Bernard Kerr, Qisheng Li, Dave B. Miller, Susanne Nobles, Alexandra Papoutsaki, Jing Qian, Tina Rezvanian, Shelley Rodrigo, Ben D. Sawyer, Shannon M. Sheppard, Bram Stein, Rick Treitman, Jen Vanek, Shaun Wallace, Benjamin Wolfe

Readability is on the cusp of a revolution. Fixed text is becoming fluid as a proliferation of digital reading devices rewrite what a document can do. As past constraints make way for more flexible opportunities, there is great need to understand how reading formats can be tuned to the situation and the individual. We aim to provide a firm foundation for readability research, a comprehensive framework for modern, multi-disciplinary readability research. Readability refers to aspects of visual information design which impact information flow from the page to the reader. Readability can be enhanced by changes to the set of typographical characteristics of a text. These aspects can be modified on-demand, instantly improving the ease with which a reader can process and derive meaning from text. We call on a multi-disciplinary research community to take up these challenges to elevate reading outcomes and provide the tools to do so effectively.

Keywords: reading, text, document, information processing, typography

1. Introduction

Readability (Fig. 1) is a growing focus because reading has fundamentally changed (Fig. 2). The amount of reading content available today is more than has ever existed, and it grows at an ever-increasing rate. The pressure to ingest vast quantities of information quickly has never been greater. Additionally, reading content is distributed across highly variable publishing platforms, which has changed what and how we read. The wider commercialization of smartphones, e-books, and lightweight laptops over the last 15 years have diversified where and when we read. Now more than ever, improving the modern reading experience has enormous practical and societal significance.

Modern reading is digital, and this has introduced a fundamental paradigm shift. To date, authors, publishers, and designers have been in control of the reading experience. This is no longer the case as evidenced by the multitude of device types, screen qualities, and software settings available to the reader. Depending on the technologies we use, we - the readers - can gain control over font size, screen polarity, spacing, font choice, and other formatting choices. Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBooks, Microsoft's Immersive Reader, Adobe's Liquid Mode, and modern web browsers all provide some of these controls. Because our devices are always with us, we now grab bits of reading here and there (Wolf, 2018): some of us check social media, others their news feeds, and still others their ebooks, news apps, or PDFs for class or the next meeting. Increasingly, we read in interludes, and with frequent interruptions, a considerably different form of reading than sitting down at length with a novel or newspaper. Existing research on reading has concentrated on fixed-format pages - either books or electronic facsimiles of books like PDFs. Recent studies indicate that we may be on the cusp of dramatically changing the way people read - making it much easier for struggling readers to read and for good readers to read even more efficiently by changing and, more significantly, personalizing the readability of the text. Indeed, the authors have seen children, both good and struggling readers, become more fluent with customized text formats (Crowley & Jordan, 2019a; Crowley & Jordan, 2019b) and adult readers add as much as 10 pages an hour when optimizing digital text for personalized reading (Wallace et al., 2020a; Wallace et al., 2020b).

Readability encapsulates those properties of a document that determine the ease and success with which individual readers decipher, process, and make meaning of the text read. While this may involve aspects of the document's content, structure, or layout more generally, our focus in this paper is on the typographical features of the text, which includes font choice, size, spacing, and related attributes. Many of the methods discussed here may nevertheless apply to studies of document readability more generally. By moving away from printed, and therefore fixed, text, readability is being fundamentally changed by digital text and the customization options that come with it. Readers - young and old, proficient and struggling - all stand to benefit immensely from having control over the format of the text that they read. Rather than a one-size-fits all, there is an opportunity to individuate for the reader and the reading context.

This new direction is a green field and needs new methodologies, tools, and approaches. The authors have been building these tools and methods over the last few years and will use this paper to share them with the greater interdisciplinary research community. In this pivotal moment, the future of readability is in the hands of a small group of present-day stakeholders.

This paper is intended as a practical foundational resource for growing the readability stakeholder community. The subject matter requires an integrated interdisciplinary approach, and correspondingly, the authors of this paper include vision scientists, technology experts, educators, designers, typographers, and data scientists; together, we represent voices from academia, tech industry, and non-profit institutions.

This paper is written for anyone interested in pushing the state of readability research: scientists, practitioners, educators, tech companies, type designers, policymakers, and engineers. Our goal is to share our methods and tools with the greater community in hopes that together we can advance the state of the research and make readability better for all.

... See the full paper on arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.09615

About arXiv: arXiv® is a curated research-sharing platform open to anyone. As a pioneer in digital open access, arXiv.org now hosts nearly two million scholarly articles in eight subject areas, curated by our strong community of volunteer moderators. arXiv offers researchers a broad range of services: article submission, compilation, production, retrieval, search and discovery, web distribution for human readers, and API access for machines, together with content curation and preservation. Our emphasis on openness, collaboration, and scholarship provide the strong foundation on which arXiv thrives.

Operations are maintained by the arXiv Leadership Team and arXiv staff at Cornell University.

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"Readability Research: An Interdisciplinary Approach" is now available on arXiv, an archival preprint service. Twenty-eight different authors - from around the world and across many disciplines - collaborated to author a 60+ page intro to Readability research toward the goal of accelerating best practices and methodologies.

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fonts.google.com/knowledge/topics/variable_fonts

design.google/library/variable-fonts-are-here-to-stay

web.dev/variable-fonts

material.io/design/typography/understanding-typography.html#readability

YouTube → “DETI Keynote Dave Crossland: The Use of Variable Fonts in Google's Branding Typography” youtu.be/yJE8wkNif5I

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Track 2 | Implementation for Education Use

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Track 2 | Implementation for Education Use

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UserTesting Profiles The Readability Consortium

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UserTesting Profiles The Readability Consortium

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The Readability Consortium + UserTesting

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How Adobe, Google, Readability Matters, and the University of Central Florida are creating breakthrough technology that improves reading for everyone

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To achieve this, The Readability Consortium will research and re-engineer Readability, making designers and readers alike ready for our information-intensive digital future.

Our membership steers collaborative research, the creation of open-source tools for the growing readability community, and the development of big data around digital reading.

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To achieve this, The Readability Consortium will research and re-engineer Readability, making designers and readers alike ready for our information-intensive digital future. Our membership steers collaborative research, the creation of open-source tools for the growing readability community, and the development of big data around digital reading.

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https://www.adobe.com/corporate-responsibility/readability.html

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We build better reading. Our mission is to engage an ecosystem of partners to deliver personalized reading environments, empowering everyone to achieve more

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Connect with the Ecosystem - submit your ideas or sign up for more information here:

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Connect with the Ecosystem - submit your ideas or sign up for more information here:

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https://readabilitymatters.org/skoll-world-forum-2022-ecosystem-event-connect

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Track 3 | Implementation in Tech Tools and for Business Use

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Track 3 | Implementation in Tech Tools and for Business Use

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Download it for free.

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Personalized Reading Formats Make Better Readers

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Facilitators: Zoya Bylinskii & Rick Treitman, Adobe

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Facilitators: Zoya Bylinskii & Rick Treitman, Adobe

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https://blog.adobe.com/en/publish/2022/02/15/adobe-announces-readability-consortium-with-google-ucf-improve-reading-for-all

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Lightning Talk: Shaun Wallace, Brown University

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Lightning Talk: Shaun Wallace, Brown University

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In my talk, I will:

Introduce the Virtual Readability Lab (VRL)

Discuss font size normalization

Present results from study on font preference & effectiveness

Discuss VRL for K-12 populations

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In my talk, I will discuss:

Dyslexia

Reading rulers & digital reading rulers

VRL experiment on digital reading rulers presented at VSS 2021 & future work

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Lightning Talk: Dr. Sofie Beier, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

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Lightning Talk: Dr. Sofie Beier, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

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In my talk, I will go over:

The effect of visual crowding on perceptual span

How effects of crowding can vary greatly for both low vision readers and young children

Reducing crowding through the use of letter spacing and letter width

Example of an experiment with low vision participants

Example of the experiment with K-8 students

Read more: https://readabilitymatters.org/articles/dr-sofie-beier-bringing-together-science-and-typography

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Dr. Shannon Sheppard, Chapman University

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Dr. Shannon Sheppard, Chapman University

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I am the Director of the Cognition Rehabilitation And Neuroscience In Atypical Language Lab (CRANIAL LAB) at Chapman University. We seek to understand how the neurotypical brain processes language and prosody. Studying the neural underpinnings in neurotypical populations helps us understand how language is organized in the brain.

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Our mission is to investigate brain mechanisms that underlie language and prosodic impairments in post-stroke aphasia, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and aprosodia. The overarching aim of our research is to use what we learn about these brain mechanisms to inform the development of innovative treatments. We use cutting-edge neuroimaging and behavioral methods to better understand the neurobiology of language and language recovery in several populations.

We also seek to understand how the neurotypical brain processes language and prosody. Studying the neural underpinnings in neurotypical populations helps us understand how language is organized in the brain.

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Our mission is to investigate brain mechanisms that underlie language and prosodic impairments in post-stroke aphasia, Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) and aprosodia. The overarching aim of our research is to use what we learn about these brain mechanisms to inform the development of innovative treatments.

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Dr. Jocelyn Dueck, Carnegie Mellon University

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Dr. Jocelyn Dueck, Carnegie Mellon University

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I am an Assistant Professor of Vocal Coaching and Collaborative Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Courante LLC, a company that assists humans and machines in speech. I am collaborating with Adobe's readability researchers to analyze prosody as adult readers read out loud.

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Dr. JOCELYN DUECK

Dr. Jocelyn Dueck, Assistant Professor of Collaborative Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Courante LLC, is a subject matter expert in prosody and related auditory coding and data structure. Her distinguished record of achievement as a practitioner in linguistics, music and language translation is supported by over thirty years' experience coaching and training others to reproduce and codify sound units, with experience in at least four different languages and multiple English language accents and dialects.

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Courante LLC | Prosody | Speech | Machine Learning

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Dr. Jocelyn Dueck, Assistant Professor of Collaborative Arts at Carnegie Mellon University and founder of Courante LLC, is a subject matter expert in prosody and related auditory coding and data structure.

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Adobe MAX: One Font Doesn’t Fit All: Type Design and Comprehension

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Adobe MAX: One Font Doesn’t Fit All: Type Design and Comprehension

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https://readabilitymatters.org/articles/adobe-max-one-font-doesnt-fit-all

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https://readabilitylab.xyz

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Increased letter spacing and greater letter width improve reading acuity in low vision readers

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Increased letter spacing and greater letter width improve reading acuity in low vision readers

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How can we make readers aware that they need these tools in the first place?

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How can we make readers aware that they need these tools in the first place?

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We need to bridge the research to the people needing the tools/solutions!

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How do we design a tool for diverse readers and reading abilities?

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How do we design a tool for diverse readers and reading abilities?

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How might individuals & their needs change over time?

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How might individuals & their needs change over time?

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How long does a personalized format stay valid for? How frequently will we need to retest individuals? How can we do this effectively?

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How long does a personalized format stay valid for? How frequently will we need to retest individuals? How can we do this effectively?

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Research findings need to be brought to the average reader. It will take many years, and only then a small % of findings will make it into tools.

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How do you create a tool that asks people to learn their optimal reading style that is inclusive?  What if your tool asks them in a format that doesn't work for them?

Perhaps offer other modalities like an audio intro

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We need to provide recommendations for different types of tools, how & which controls to add.

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We need to provide recommendations for different types of tools, how & which controls to add.

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LabintheWild - Test your peripheral vision!

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Are you curious about how accurate your peripheral vision is compared to others? Learn more about your visual perception by doing these fun tasks! This test takes around 8 minutes.

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WebGazer.js: Democratizing Webcam Eye Tracking on the Browser

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WebGazer.js is an eye tracking library that uses common webcams to infer the eye-gaze locations of web visitors on a page in real time. The eye tracking model it contains self-calibrates by watching web visitors interact with the web page and trains a mapping between the features of the eye and positions on the screen.

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Children's Speech Recognition & Voice Technology Solutions | SoapBox Labs

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Award-winning speech recognition tech that actually understands kids. Privacy-first. High accuracy. All ages and accents. Try our API for free.

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Platform used in the K8 Readability Comprehension Study. https://readabilitymatters.org/articles/sneak-peek-20-percent-increase-in-student-comprehension

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Studying complex behaviour shouldn't be complex. Our powerful and easy to use online tools allow you to build experiments with minimal effort.

From simple questionnaires and reaction-time tasks to complex multi-day training studies and randomised controlled trials, we've got you covered.

Seamlessly integrated with popular recruitment services, you can source a wide and diverse range of participants to complete your study fast.

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Powerful easy-to-use software for online behavioural research

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Study­ing complex behav­iour should­n't be complex. Our pow­er­ful and easy to use online tools allow you to build exper­i­ments with minimal effort. From simple ques­tion­naires and reac­tion-time tasks to complex multi-day train­ing studies and ran­domised con­trolled trials, we've got you covered.

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Could analyzing changes in a reader's voice become a diagnostic tool?

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Publication sources (NYT, Post, etc)
Publishers
Amazon
Microsoft

What if authors chose to publish considering the format options of their readers