InDiE-Book (Interactive Digital E-Book)

The motivation for this group project came from the term Multimodal Literacy in the question of "How could the E-book of the future look like?" presented to us by Nota, Nationalbibliotek for mennesker med læsevanskeligheder (the Danish National Library for the Blind, People with Dyslexia and Reading Disorders). Before June 2009, Nota has only been in charge of providing text and digital audible content for the blind and visually impaired people, which they have been doing for about 80 years. After 2009, they have been given by Kulturministeriet (the Ministery of Culture) the additional task to provide knowledge content for a new and growing target audience: people with dyslexia and reading disorders, with different needs compared to Nota's initial target audience.
We have done research on Nota's current mode of operation and how they produce content to their two target audiences. Furthermore, we have performed several targeted interviews with five pupils from Ryå Efterskole and five adults: a blind, a visually impaired, a dyslexic, a teacher, and the headmaster of Ryå Efterskole.
Based on this research we have formulated the following problem statement for our project:
How can a user centric interactive digital application facilitate a better reading experience for people with dyslexia and assist them in becoming equals in accessing knowledge as "common" readers?
We started out with a phenomenological approach by doing research on learning strategies, on how the human being learn and accumulate knowledge, and how people with dyslexia are described in the literature, in order to get a better understanding of what the dyslexia really is. We have investigated the current media technologies and applications developed to support people with dyslexia to read, write and learn in school.
As the result of our research we have developed a concept for an E-book reader and a prototype for tablet computer with the main objective of helping the persons with dyslexia in getting a better reading experience by giving the possibility to choose between the different help functions which can be definded on the profile site.
Our main recommendation is to provide the possibility to the user to create visual and audible anchor points inside the application while reading an E-book. This interactive feature will help the persons with dyslexia mark the progress inside the E-book reader and will facilitate an enhanced reading experience.
Here are some print screens from the prototype: