Japanese Text Presentation System for Pupils with Reading Difficulties

Abstract

There are many pupils with reading difficulty in Japanese schools. The dyslexia is the disability about reading and writing texts. We use Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana characters in Japanese sentences. We propose the Japanese text presentation system that eases the difficulties about reading Japanese texts with or without dyslexia. The kanji is an ideograph. The hiragana and the katakana are phonograms. The reading difficulties include 2 types. One is a difficulty about reading the kanji. Another is the difficulty about tracing the reading sequence. This paper proposes a system that presents the Japanese sentences with suitable presentation method for each pupil with reading difficulties. The main function of the proposed system is 3 levels of highlighting/masking that are independently controlled. The highlighting only is not enough to prevent the error about the reading sequence of character chunks. The 3 level highlighting/masking enables to adapt the presentation to wide varieties of reading difficulties. This paper proposes the design and the experiments of the Japanese text presentation system on the students without reading difficulty.