Adobe Computer Scientist Presents Digital Reading Rulers Research
From computer scientist and engineer to published researcher, first-author Aleena Niklaus presented Digital Reading Rulers: Evaluating Inclusively Designed Rulers for Readers With Dyslexia and Without at the leading international conference on Human-Computer Interaction ACM CHI’23. Physical reading rulers have been used with books for years as a readability aid. The research team wanted to explore digital implementations and designed 4 types of rulers for readers to use. They concluded that digital reading rulers could improve reading speed and comprehension for readers with and without dyslexia and found that, consistent with other readability research, there was no single ruler style that all participants preferred.
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Aleena is a computer scientist researching readability and accessibility for the Adobe Readability Initiative. Additionally, she is involved in developing evaluation prototypes and automation pipelines for Project Firefly and is working on Asset Compute for Adobe Experience Manager (Experience Cloud).
Aleena’s investigations into reading rulers started as a winning entry in an internal Adobe Hackathon. The work gained interest and was later expanded to larger focus groups and crowdsourced user studies.
We look forward to Aleena’s next readability research project. Congratulations, Aleena!
Learn more about Digital Reading Rulers:
- See our Research Highlight on Aleena’s work: Research Highlight | Digital Reading Rulers
- Read the paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3581367
- Play with the Reading Rulers: http://aleena.io/drr
- Access the open-source code: https://github.com/adobe/digital-reading-rulers
- Watch the Pre-recorded presentation videos for papers at CHI’23 Digital Reading Rulers: Evaluating Inclusively Designed Rulers for Readers With Dyslexia and Without
- See Aleena’s Lightning Talk: Reading Rulers Research Findings
- Adobe Blog: New Adobe research examines user-centric designs for diverse digital reading needs
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