Readability Matters White Paper:
Maximizing Individual Reading Performance with Tuned Text
Kathy Crowley and Marjorie Jordan
July 17, 2019
Many researchers have demonstrated the value of changing text format to increase reading speed and accuracy for an individual.
THE PROBLEM
Unfortunately, the issue with adopting more readable text as an approach for education or even for individuals is the difficulty of generating it and making it available. The process of gathering the reading material, pulling it into a word processor, making the readability changes, and then producing it electronically or printing it for reading on paper, is extremely arduous. The amount of work required to support each individual is not sustainable and is definitely not scalable for classrooms of readers reading in different individually best formats.
TECH PROOF OF CONCEPT
Readability Matters co-founders Kathy Crowley and Marjorie Jordan approached a technology company, Adobe, with the insight to take a reader-centric view to enhance the reading experience offered by their application. Adobe agreed to create a prototype of their Reader product with additional Readability Features for an iPad. They added Readability Features to allow choice of font, size, line spacing, character spacing, and character width. Five formats were created and then used to test each student.
RESULTS
Key Takeaways
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No one format was best for all readers.
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A significant portion of the test population improved their speed of accurate reading.
Student Highlights
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Some readers in all reading segments (high, medium, low) showed significant improvement.
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Read the 
full White Paper here. Request the PDF version of the paper.
Read More
Adobe’s Rick Treitman shares his perspective on the Proof of Concept Study:
