Accessible Arabic Reading for Students with Disabilities

Abstract

Readability is an area of research that involves assessing the difficulty level of texts. It involves different aspects, mainly: the reader population, the nature of the texts and the purpose of reading. The objective of adapting a readability measure in the material selection process is to deliver information to a larger population of users in an easily readable and understandable format. For particular populations, such as people suffering from disabilities, it is important to collect concise, up to-date recommendations, and raise awareness of the problems faced by these people. In this work, we suggest an automatic process for measuring Arabic text readability for learners with disabilities. This study is performed based on the Modern Standard Arabic Readability corpus (MoSAR), which is a set of texts designed for learning Arabic as a first language (L1). MoSAR texts are annotated with six difficulty levels according to the grades of the Moroccan elementary school. The proposed approach combines classical, non-classical readability features, and features dedicated to learners with disabilities. The principal objective in this study stands on evaluating the performance of the combining features in predicting readability for learners with disabilities. The obtained results reported a maximum accuracy of 77.47%.