Tactile Letters: A Tangible Tabletop with Texture Cues Supporting Alphabetic Learning for Dyslexic Children

Dyslexic children have great difficulty in learning to read. While research in HCI suggests that tangible user interfaces (TUIs) have the potential to support children learning to read, few studies have explored how to help dyslexic children learn to read. Even fewer studies have specifically investigated the design space of texture cues in TUIs in supporting learning to read. In this paper, we present Tactile Letters, a multimodal tangible tabletop with texture cues developed to support English letter-sound correspondence learning for dyslexic children aged 5-6 years old. This prototype is used as a research instrument to investigate the role of texture cues in a multimodal TUI in alphabetic learning. We discuss the current knowledge gap, the theoretical foundations that informed our core design strategy, and the subsequent design decisions we made while developing Tactile Letters.