Easier digital information through a simplification system that promotes cognitive accessibility for those with intellectual disabilities.
The EASIER project, from the Human Language and Accessibility Technologies (HULAT) Group of the Computer Science Department of the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M), has developed an open source system that seeks to improve accessibility to digital information by promoting access to people with intellectual disabilities.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the information society present accessibility barriers, which affect people with disabilities to a greater extent. There is more awareness of the needs of people with sensory and physical disabilities, overlooking the cognitive barriers caused by the difficult comprehension of texts that mainly affect people with intellectual disabilities and the elderly.
With this idea in mind, the aim was to provide, on the one hand, technology to support the automatic simplification of textual content in Spanish to make it easier to read and, on the other hand, technology to generate accessible user interfaces that include this simplified textual content.
For the lexical simplification of textual content in Spanish, the WCAG accessibility guidelines related to language were followed, in accordance with legislation in Spain, as well as Easy Reading (UNE 153101: Easy reading. Guidelines and Recommendations for Document Preparation) and Plain Language guidelines. As a means of solution, methods from fields that support the systematic fulfillment of these cognitive accessibility requirements have been used, such is the case of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence.
The project resulted in the development of the EASIER system, which includes an intuitive interface where the user can include text along with an optimized interface to ensure cognitive accessibility with simplified, easier and more understandable text. In addition, a browser extension has also been developed to distinguish complex and uncommon words on a web page according to different metrics, providing the user with a simpler synonym.