The Better Reader
The Better Reader is a project to help people with dyslexia or people with reading issues be able to read with more agility and accuracy. It will draw its inspiration from dyslexia reading exercises and the game of Wack-A-Mole.
The project’s foundation will be to develop interaction between the computer (using Arduino and Processing), and the human user. First of all, it will have communication between two languages in the computer world, which are Arduino and Processing. These two together will be interacting together to create animation, audio, text, and sound depending on the human’s response to the computer. The interaction that we will design is supposed to be easy for the users to figure out. This last will be explained in the following paragraph.
The Better Reader will draw upon common exercises that are used to improve eyesight, as well as exercises for reading more quickly, and will combine this with the concept of the Wack-A-Mole game. These exercises which we draw upon have also been proven useful for people with dyslexia. A user will see on the computer (Processing will be used for the animation) three columns of three words each (nine words in total). One word is going to blink (disappear and appear) from the top left one by one and row by row until it reaches the last word and it goes back to the top to start again. This will allow the user to direct his attention to the word that is blinking, facilitating the interaction between humans and machines. The program will randomly stop at any given word and it will ask the user to identify the last word that disappeared and appeared. It will give for options (four words), and if you select the correct word, the program will accelerate the word blinking pattern to make it harder for the user to follow along. The user will have three “lives” (opportunities to lose and keep playing). To make it more engaging we will use Arduino to connect to a console that has four electronic buttons. These electronic buttons will have the word options written on them. This means that we will have to program the buttons to give different four-word options on each level, and it will obviously have to include the right choice in one of the buttons. The user will have a time limit to choose the right answer; we are thinking of limiting this time to five seconds. We want to have a hammer similar to the one in the Whack-A-Mole game so that the users can quickly hit the given answer. Furthermore, we would like to have a scoreboard with the ranking of the people that have “played” this game in hopes of incentivizing friendly competition.
This exercise should be useful as it would allow users to develop their peripheral view, their concentration, and their short term memory. It is not going to feel like those tedious exercises that we who have dyslexia have to do but is rather going to feel like we are just playing a game. I think that understanding the struggle of dyslexia will push our team to focus on creating not just an exercise for reading but a game that is fun. Something that can put learning and fun together. Hopefully, there will be much to gain not just for people with dyslexia but for everyone.