Customized Text: The Technology Behind the Company

Research in the field of reading has helped to delineate aspects of the structure of text our eyes and brains draw upon most as we scan letters and words. The fundamental service of Australia’s ReadHowYouWant company is based on a premise of individualized mental processing of text that takes this research several steps further. The company configures text in a variety of logical formats to assist different types of readers recognize words more easily by manipulating or building new forms of cueing within the structure of text itself.

ReadHowYouWant begins by marking up documents into very accurate XML files that can be reformatted into myriad print or electronic formats benefiting: general readers and those who are blind or have low vision, multiple sclerosis, macular degeneration, visual tracking problems, or many other issues that may effect fluency.

Reading Customized Text: How it Works

ReadHowYouWant offers a tool individuals can use to design a text format that is completely personalized and effective for them. The sample below is designed to help readers who need assistance in discriminating characters that have mirrored (e.g. b and d) or similarly-shaped forms in the alphabet:

Source: F. Scott Fitzgerald

For readers who formulate their sense of words based only on the initial letter elements (graphemes) or letter pairs (digraphs), the following configuration has been designed to draw attention fully through to the latter morphological elements of the word for greater accuracy:

Some of the company’s formats embed signals of phrase changes to reinforce meaning, others ease eye strain, and still others provide embedded pronunciation cues (for readers with Limited English Proficiency). DAISY audio versions—which can be used in conjunction with individualized text formatting, NIMAS format, and enlarged text—are also available.

ReadHowYouWant partners with publishers, providing mark-up and conversion services, marketing support and distribution through Amazon.com as well as the company’s web-site. The company also works with non-profit agencies offering an efficient and cost effective solution to meet the format requirements of the populations they serve.

Assistive Technology Needs Sparked Innovation

The road to ReadHowYouWant began with Chris’s studies in math, physics, economics, and law at the University of Sydney. After graduating, Chris began a company in which he formatted and consolidated a complex maze of legal statutes in Australia. Using the forerunner of XML, he developed very accurate publishing systems and skills. The transfer of those skills began when his older sister, a lifelong reader, developed multiple sclerosis. Chris reports:

As she became increasingly physically incapacitated, she wanted to read even more, but she found that she was having eye-tracking problems and was not able to read small print. With my publishing background, I scanned and ‘OCR‘d’ some of these books and tried a whole series of different formats. We found one that worked, and for five or six years, she was able to read. I realized that I had believed that it was the reader’s responsibility to find a way to read the published edition of a book. The experiment with my sister really shifted that belief structure in my head. I saw that one size does not fit all when it comes to publishing and that different people NEED different editions.

The experience led Chris and his colleagues into a review of research literature:

There was no material we found that really talked about changing the format of materials to suit the reader. The old scientist came out in me and we tried various different formats on people. We started to realize that it was very personal. Some people liked one thing for a reason and other people liked other formats for another reason.

Design Principles Behind the Customized Text

Lying behind the profound flexibility of ReadHowYouWant are principles based in an informed view of the reading process and a nod toward the scientific community’s increasing understanding of the plasticity of the brain:

Our mental model of reading suggests that reading is very complicated. There may be some 20 things you need to have right, or almost right, to get it to work. You need to be able to see or feel if you’ve got Braille. You need to be able to turn pages if you’ve got a physical book and that’s a problem for quadriplegics. You’ve got to be able to sound out words, and for non-phonetic words you’ve got to be able to recognize the whole word—word recognition—and associate an auditory sound with the word. And you have to be able to remember that association. Sounding out letters, it turns out, uses a completely different part of the brain than recognizing words. People in countries where words are phonetic may not develop the capacity to recognize sight words very well because they don’t have to. They may have developed different neural pathways. Most of these people can probably develop the neural pathways to enable them to read English efficiently.

Chris reports that his own experimentation in teaching himself to read Braille by touch led to important conclusions that inform the approach of the company. He carefully observed the time and labor he spent trying to recognize individual Braille characters. He would spend thirty minutes decoding a single paragraph without meaning to “work that out,” but subsequently could re-read and understand the paragraph. However, he could only do so if he read it with a high enough level of speed:

The faster you can read, we believe, the bigger the chunk of information you can process, that is, the more detailed the internalized memory image you can create to remember it. The speed at which you read—fluency—is important. Where people are slow readers because they have underdeveloped neural pathways, it is possible to help them develop the pathway—going back to being a normal reader. That’s our belief.

Reading Needs and Research-based Outcomes

Detailed experimentation and testing has continually influenced formulation. For example, in order to develop specific solutions, Chris studied readers with spatial orientation problems who have difficulty moving from a body of text to a footnote and back again. The company is now beginning to work on more formal research with the New South Wales Departments of Health and Education and other groups. At one trade show, however, the tension between the exigencies of proving outcomes and the need to get solutions to users quickly to resolve real and immediate needs was dramatically highlighted for Chris:

A very articulate American teenager came up to our table and said, ‘I can read this! When are you going to publish these books?’ I said, ‘Oh, I think we need to do some research and make sure these are going to work for people.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Stephen, Sir, I do NOT need some academic to tell me that I can read this text!’ I laughed and said, ‘I think you just won your argument.’

Assistive Technology and the Publishing Market

Chris believes demand for various print formats will increase vigorously in the near term against a currently inflexible market environment in which less than 2 percent of published materials are even made available in standard large print. At the heart of ReadHowYouWant’s systems and algorithms are superior accuracy, automation, and extreme cost savings to provide text, including best sellers, in a wide range of readable formats compared to traditional piecemeal methods. Chris explains,

If publishers were able to sell all formats at a fair price to readers at the date of publication, then everybody would win: readers would be able to buy the format that best suits them, publishers and authors would receive revenue for each edition sold, no matter in what format, and disability support organizations will have their resources freed up. The market model would therefore resolve the current tensions between publishers, who want to be paid for their materials, and charities and educational bodies who find it hard to afford the current conversion costs.

Chris believes this market-driven approach that involves publishers so directly will lead to a much broader range of titles in multiple print and electronic formats being made available for these underserved populations as well as for general readers. The company’s process involves advising publishers on appropriate titles, obtaining and marking the files for these titles in XML, efficiently converting these titles into a range of formats, and loading these new editions on the company’s web-site and Amazon. ReadHowYouWant can even typeset the publisher’s normal print edition if desired, saving a step. Consumers can download electronic formats or order print versions which are produced on demand. Once a version has sold, ReadHowYouWant pays a part of the sales to the publishing house. This permits publishers to experiment with the market for alternative formats with little or no risk.

The Fourth-grade Reading Slump: Changing Perspectives on the Role of Text

Chris notes a discrepancy between primary grade text, involving large text and graphics, and upper elementary grade material which abruptly presents much smaller text and new forms of structure. He postulates that this may be a major contributor to declining reading abilities for students in the later grades that are often noted on standardized achievement tests. Chris believes the formatting flexibility ReadHowYouWant offers can serve as a bridge to create a seamless transition in published materials for smooth and steady reading growth throughout K-12 education.

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