Evaluation of DysWebxia: a reading app designed for people with dyslexia

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present the evaluation of DysWebxia, a reading app for iOS devices, specially designed for people with dyslexia. DysWebxia integrates previous results about the best way to present text for people with dyslexia together with a unique feature, the ability to show synonyms on demand for complex words. Although the new algorithm used for this unique feature is language independent, our first prototype is for Spanish. To evaluate DysWebxia we carried out two different user studies. One to evaluate the quality of the synonyms on demand that included 32 participants with dyslexia and 38 strong readers without dyslexia, and another one to evaluate the usability of the app based on 12 participants. Our results show that the quality of the synonyms generated by the new algorithm outperforms a frequency based baseline, and that the participants found DysWebxia very usable. Therefore, we show that this app may have in the future a large impact for people with dyslexia.

References

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