Beyond Simplification: DFT-GEN for Fidelity-Preserving Visual Accessibility in Dyslexia-Friendly Educational Texts
This work provides a method to improve reading accessibility for dyslexic individuals in educational settings, specifically by reducing reading burden without compromising information fidelity, which is a significant incremental improvement for this user group.
This paper addresses the challenge of making dense educational texts more accessible for people with dyslexia without sacrificing crucial information. The authors developed DFT-GEN, a text transformation framework that preserves task-critical information while improving visual accessibility, winning 93% in English and 64% in Chinese of B-DVAS-VL pairwise judgments against same-backbone controls.
Dense educational texts impose avoidable reading friction on people with dyslexia, yet generic simplification can delete terminology, task constraints, or source evidence that readers still need. Stakeholder interviews with dyslexic adults and specialists reveal a core tension: reduced burden must not compromise information fidelity. We present DFT-GEN, a stakeholder-informed text transformation framework for content-heavy educational materials. Its central contribution is not a generic LLM refinement loop, but a dyslexia-specific accessibility layer that combines protected-span preservation with a deterministic Dyslexia Accessibility Controller (DAC) for rendered visual organization. DAC converts stakeholder and expert preferences into reproducible controls for visual-unit length, chunk spacing, source/task separation, highlighting budget, and reviewable risk flags. We therefore separate evaluation into DCFI, a fidelity-safety diagnostic, and B-DVAS-VL, a rendered visual-accessibility diagnostic. On 2,280 bilingual exam-style items, DFT-GEN preserves task-critical information while improving visual accessibility: it wins 93% in English and 64% in Chinese of B-DVAS-VL pairwise judgments against same-backbone controls, and in a controlled pilot with dyslexic adult readers it preserves answerability while reducing effort.