On Support for Dyslexic Students in Senior-High School and Higher Education.

Abstract

It is very difficult to provide dyslexic students in senior-high school or higher education with all necessary textbooks in ordinary accessible format such as multimedia DAISY. Here, a new approach to provide them with a new type of accessible textbooks named "Fixed-Layout DAISY" is shown. In it, the whole page is treated as a multi-layer picture, the front layer of which has the same form as the original PDF. A DAISY (EPUB3) player can read out any texts together with highlighting them. It does not have the reflow function. The page layout is always kept as same as the original. It does not have information either in which order texts on the page should be read out, and readers need to click a text block on a page where they want to read. Dyslexic people can see and click a place where they want to read, and obviously, Fixed-Layout DAISY should work for them. Fixed-Layout DAISY can be produced almost automatically from an original "e-born PDF" by making use of our OCR system, and it should be very helpful for the dyslexic students to get accessible version of their textbooks.