Ben D. Sawyer, PhD, Director of Virtual Readability Lab at University of Central Florida, and Stephanie Day, PhD, Research Scientist at University of Central Florida, talk about a new prescription that can help people read better.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News in March 2022.
Can you talk about this concept of individual reading prescriptions? How did that idea come about?
SAWYER: So, the work that we’re doing now came out of work that I did at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We were looking at interfaces for vehicles and asking the question, how do you get your eyes back on the road after a message from your GPS? One of the things we could change about those interfaces that was really helpful was the textual components, things like font. I was really surprised at how much impact font could have. So, when I came to the University of Central Florida, I was having some conversations with Adobe about this effect, and we were talking about the idea that it might take place in longer documents. The question was, could you change longer documents to help readers by tuning fonts? That work told us that, while there are some fonts that work better for everyone, the effects are very small, as you might expect, right? You’ve probably never found a font that really hurts you a lot as a reader. But what we also found is that, for individuals, certain fonts seemed to work much better and certain fonts seemed to work much worse. That was the beginning of this idea of individual readability. Traditionally, the idea of readability has been finding the best format for everyone or the best format for a population. So, for example, large text for older readers, right? But what we found was that certain fonts and certain spacings seem to work very well at the individual level. A way to think about this is the idea of glasses. If I was to ask you what the average prescription is, there is probably no average prescription. On average, humans are a little bit myopic, but that doesn’t help us with anything. What I need to know is your prescription, and that’s very much what we’re finding with textual information, that we can identify certain types of typography that seem to really help the individual. And conversely, there are certain types that seem to really hurt individuals. So, all of us walk through life carrying with us best and worst formats, maybe never knowing it. It can get ironic. I am a professor. I read in Times New Roman almost all the time because it’s what academic publications are in. It’s what most academic textbooks are in. As it turns out, it’s one of my worst fonts, and that’s a surprising thing. I have been walking through my career reading in a format that slows me down by, personally, about 15, 20 percent. I never knew I was doing that. And by using my best font, I’m able to significantly increase the speed at which I can read and the comprehension that I have in that material.
DAY: So, it’s kind of like a pair of eyeglasses. We all have a prescription that helps us see better. Our research is showing is that when it comes to digital reading, there are formats in which people can read more proficiently in. So, we’re trying to build this body of research to look at how we can best identify someone’s best format, and then, how we can find ways to apply that across all the surfaces in which they read to help them read better.
How can you go about finding an individual’s good versus bad fonts?
DAY: So, we’re looking at things like font, the size of the font character, and the line spacing.
SAWYER: We talk about best format, and we use the word typography a lot because, while font is one of the things that we found that seems to have best and worst fonts among common fonts for people, it’s also true that spacing seems to make a difference in a variety of different dimensions. Also, it’s not really that font is the be all, end all, it’s just that certain fonts help you in certain ways. And we don’t really understand how that works yet. We’re doing research now to tear apart fonts and typography and try to understand what’s driving these effects – that’s vision science or psychophysics work. To get to the larger question – could you restate the other piece? I clarified.
How can someone find their individual prescription?
SAWYER: So, to find your own best format, we use something very similar to the way you find your own best prescription with eyeglasses. And we’ve modeled it after that prescription process. We put you in texts – and we call them passages – that are in different formats. And we have you read and then answer comprehension questions. And then we have people talk about what they liked best. The interesting thing is that that preference, what people think will help the most, is usually not correct. People aren’t better at chance at finding their best format. But by looking at speed and comprehension, we’re able to identify which format helped them the most. And then, by using technologies that can change text in documents, we can deliver that to them. And that’s a big part of the ecosystem. Finding your prescription is only the first step, but then, you have to find a way to carry it with you across all of these digital reading surfaces that are in our lives.
How do you conduct these tests?
SAWYER: We do some of our work in the laboratory and we use eye tracking and other pieces of experimental equipment that really tell us how people are reading. They give us ground truth information. But to do this for the average person who comes to our website, we can’t move our laboratory to their living room. So, we use that very granular data to inform a web version, which is called the Virtual Readability Laboratory. The VRL, which is available at readabilitylab.xyz, does the same process but without the equipment and measures how quickly you read things and how well you read them and how much comprehension you get and then uses those to tell you which format helps you most and least. So, there’s a little divide in our work between the work we do in the laboratory, which informs the work that we make available to the public through our website.
With this research, what implications and everyday uses can this have?
SAWYER: It can have huge implications. How well you read is really your ability to perform in the world in many ways – in education, in your job. So much of your performance depends on the written word. So, one of the things that we believe is that we can generate additional opportunity for people by providing them additional access to the written word. So, for example, if you are in an information worker job, as so many people are right now, your ability to move through information and find whatever you’re paid to find defines your success as a worker. It also defines your happiness. Everybody has too much to read, right now. Information overload is a huge problem and by giving people additional ability to move through material, we also hope to free up time for them to do other things and help them to get ahead of some of these ever-increasing demands, especially during the pandemic where most jobs have seen an uptick in the amount of demand of what they’re doing and the amount of material that they need to move through. That can happen in all sorts of positions. You might be surprised to take a moment with a job and really consider how much reading it actually involves. We work with technicians who repair equipment and spend their days in complex manuals, referring to often very dangerous machinery. We work with medical professionals who spend their time working through vast amounts of information about an individual’s medical history at great speed in a race to save their life. We work with teachers and students who are trying to move traditional education into a very artificial environment, Zoom and online education, and who are really struggling to keep up with the informational demands there. Practically, any job, if you pick it apart, has a huge textual reading component, and that component is often integral to the success of a person trying to do that job.
Have you guys done any studies to see how effective this can be?
SAWYER: The early studies that we did are done in student populations. And those studies show that the difference between a person’s best and worst format among very common formats – the ones that you would find as options on a webpage or the top eight fonts of the web – can be between 30 and 50 percent, in terms of speed. That’s a huge jump. If you consider a person who’s trying to make their way through a novel, you might literally cut in half the time it takes them to access that material. When people are prioritizing speed, comprehension stays flat. So, what we’re exploring now is the balance. What about people who need to get a lot more comprehension and for whom speed is less of an issue? Comprehension is a fuzzier number. But the bottom line is that the benefits are substantial, and the benefits are much greater than I initially imagined they would be. We’re very excited by how this individualized readability is able to help people.
Could you go into detail on the studies that you did with kids?
SAWYER: When I say students here, I’m actually speaking about college students. We do have a whole line of research looking at children, but we’ve just started the work. And we’re partnering with public schools to ask whether this can actually help younger kids. I am not leading that work. Dr. Stephanie Day, who’s a member of my laboratory staff, is leading that work.
DAY: I was brought on to the team because my expertise is in literacy development, and early childhood. I have extensive experience doing classroom-based research. So, I’m here to lead the team in doing this research in K through 12 populations. We just started two studies with children. One is a home study with local tutoring groups. And then, we just began data collection in classrooms in Florida where teachers are having their students complete our readability test in the classroom.
How long have you guys been running the study?
DAY: We just started it.
How many students are going to participate in the study?
DAY: This first initial study, we are hoping to have around 300 kids. We’re still trying to recruit. So, I don’t have the exact number yet. But we have a lot of interested teachers that want to see how this works for their students.
So, they take this test and then, what happens after they take the test?
DAY: The test will tell them what their best format is. Essentially, in which font did they read the fastest? We’re looking at font and spacing in this first initial study to see how that works for this population of students. We also consider reading comprehension.
What do you guys do with that information?
DAY: So, our goal is to eventually see how this works over time. Once they have their best format, how can we apply that across the different programs and software that they use? And can we see longer term effects and increased fluency and reading comprehension?
Once they take the test, is there anything else that they do within the study besides that, or do you guys just use that information and analyze from there?
DAY: Right now, it’s just the test. It’s the first step in our process. We’re developing a test that can accurately identify what your best format is. And then from there, we plan to go into more intervention-type work so having them read other content outside of our test, for example, in that format.
What kind of things can an 11th grader that’s been reading in the “wrong format” gain from this?
DAY: Well, our goal is to help people read more efficiently. We’re living in an age where we’re constantly reading on phones for work, for pleasure, you name it. Kids are growing up in that same digital world. So, this can potentially help them absorb material more easily and quickly in a more efficient manner. And if we can even see boost to comprehension, that’ll be big.
I know you guys just started, but do you guys have any results or feedback yet on a common font or a common spacing or any type of format that seems to be the best for students?
DAY: Our early studies with some of our partners who did this in K through seventh grade shows that there isn’t one best format. And that’s the whole point of this is that there is no one-size-best-fits-all and every student seems to have an individualized format. But we’ll be looking at that as we build the research.
Besides looking at it for children, is there any other either work or studies are coming out of this?
SAWYER: Right now, there is quite a lot of additional work coming out of this. We’re working with children to try to understand if this can change the trajectory of learners. That’s very early work. We’re working with industry to try to build this into an ecosystem that will be seamless to you as a user. We would like you to have your prescription, but then be able to carry it with you digitally and see your best format across all the surfaces in your life. And that type of digital magic takes a lot of work and amazing partners, and we do have those. We’re working with Adobe and Google and Readability Matters to build that experience and to make this something that you can carry with you through life the way you would carry a pair of reading glasses. We’re also looking at this in professional settings. We’re working with war fighters and working with the Army and the Air Force to understand how we can help enlisted populations do their jobs better and to better sift through information. We’re also looking at this in contexts like cyber defense, textual environments that we use to protect ourselves. So, there’s a lot of different contexts that we’re pursuing, right now. And we’re breaking off pieces of the world where we think this work can help professional populations to succeed at whatever they need to succeed at and help the populations they help.
For the work where you guys are partnering with all these different companies to possibly bring this individual prescription that people can carry, how far in line do you think that will be until that could happen?
SAWYER: It will be a little bit of time before you can get your prescription and carry it with you through the world, but we’re building versions of that, right now. So, for example, Adobe has a technology called Liquid Mode, which allows you to take a PDF – which is traditionally a very inflexible object. If you open a PDF on your computer and I open it on mine, it should look the same and make aspects of that flexible to allow you to change the font size and, eventually, other aspects of the typography. Likewise, there are technologies that allow you to reflow the web and to change aspects of the typography. So, pieces of this ecosystem exist now. What will take time is building it so that your prescription can be carried as a token across all these different applications and surfaces so that it’s seamless for you so that if you look at something on your iPad or on your computer, it’s all in your best format and helping you to read the best way that you can. That will probably take years, but we’re looking to build it as soon as we can. And I will say that some of us are using it already. I already move much of my reading into my best format. And we’re testing it in specific places. So, we have partnerships with the University of Arizona to look at the question of how can this be used to enhance teachers working with students on both ends? So, can you give students access to their best format and also teachers and sort of speed up the cycle between students and teachers that exists in education?
There are certain conditions where seeing words on a page don’t look the same as everybody else, like dyslexia. How can this change that for them?
SAWYER: One of the exciting things about this individualized readability is that it seems to help people who are from every type of reading background. So, if you’re a very good, fast reader, you get a boost out of this. If you are a much slower reader, you get a boost out of it. Reading populations like dyslexics and other forms of reading disability also get a strong boost out of it. It is a tide that lifts all ships. And that’s a happy thing about the technology. It means that this can be used to help pretty much any population. There’s something important that happens to people who struggle to read when you give them a little more ability to read. It can get them over a threshold of reading being a useful tool for them. So, if you can get someone to the point where they can read to learn or read to work, it can dramatically change their life. And that’s one of the things we hope we can do with this technology is bump people over the threshold to which reading is a useful tool and can change their life in meaningful ways. Specifically for dyslexic populations, we know that this is an important piece of what our individualized readability may be able to help and we’re doing very early work to understand what that looks like. We don’t have any results yet. And we’re partnering with some excellent groups like the University of Toronto, Adobe, Readability Matters to really try to do this work the right way and to quantify very carefully the ways in which we can help these populations.
DAY: We’re hoping that we can see even greater boost for kids who are struggling readers or who have things like dyslexia, for example. We don’t know quite yet what that effect will be, but we think we’ll see boosts for everyone. But if we can see boost for struggling readers, that will be impactful.
Is there anything that you feel is important for people to know?
SAWYER: One piece that’s worth talking about – there’s this idea that we’re reading less and less that gets thrown around in society. And in reality, it is my belief that we’re reading more and more, that digital reading is blended into practically everything we do. And there’s a lot of reading that happens opportunistically throughout a person’s day. You sit down and you catch up on some social media. You read over the top of TikTok videos. You read in the middle of an interface in your smartphone that’s helping you to place an order. You research something you’re going to purchase. It goes on and on and on. Reading is blended into so many interfaces that we touch every day that we may be reading more than we ever have. And I mean in the history of reading. We’re at an interesting moment in history where all the world’s information is in your pocket and my pocket, and we have instant access to knowledge that would have been considered a miracle only a few generations ago. We shouldn’t forget that we use this a lot. There are so many moments where we have a question and reach into our pocket and answer it. And because of that, reading is becoming the center of this societal superpower that we’ve developed. It’s beyond a societal superpower. Reading is becoming the center of this power that the human species has developed. This is an amazing moment in history, but it’s very important that we create tools to keep up with what we’ve built informationally. There are people who are really struggling with the amount of information that they need to access every day in order to just do the very basic activities to survive. So, I think one of the exciting things about this work is we can give people a tool that doesn’t just add another informational requirement to their life but eases a little bit of that information overload burden. Information overload is no joke. Research shows that it is linked to things like depression and anxiety. And we all know that feeling. All of us spend moments of our day when we’re behind on the information that we have to get to. So, one of the things I’m really excited about in this readability work is the opportunity to give people some breathing space and to give them back a little bit of control. I mean, I could use that. I’m sure that you could too. We all could. So maybe that’s an important piece that’s not touched on. It’s a weird moment we live in. If you talk to older folks, they will tell you exactly how strange the current moment is.
DAY: The big take-home is that this is something that could potentially help support reading development for kids. You can instantly change a format without having to do in a time and resource intensive intervention that teachers are used to having to try to implement in their classrooms with everything else they have going on. So, this is a potential tool that can boost reading in a really simple but effective way for students.
What other tools do you think this can be helpful for, for students in the classroom?
DAY: Well, our goal is to get your format in a digital token and then it can be instantly applied on your computer across all of the programs that you use like PDFs, different types of tests, software programs that students use just for daily activities is our long-term goal.
END OF INTERVIEW
This information is intended for additional research purposes only. It is not to be used as a prescription or advice from Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Inc. or any medical professional interviewed. Ivanhoe Broadcast News, Inc. assumes no responsibility for the depth or accuracy of physician statements. Procedures or medicines apply to different people and medical factors; always consult your physician on medical matters.
If you would like more information, please contact:
Robert Wells Amy Giroux
Robert.wells@ucf.edu amy.giroux2@ucf.edu
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