JAPANESE TEXT PRESENTATION SYSTEM FOR PERSONS

WITH READING DIFFICULTY

Design and Implementation

Kyota Aoki and Shinjiro Murayama

Graduate School of Engineering, Utsunomiya University, 7-1-2 yoto, 321-8585 Utsunomiya, Japan

Keywords: Reading Difficulty, Text Presentation, Highlighting/Masking, Dyslexia.

Abstract: There are many pupils with reading difficulty in Japanese schools. The dyslexia is the disability about

reading and writing texts. We use Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana characters in Japanese sentences. We propose

the Japanese text presentation system that eases the difficulties about reading Japanese texts with or without

dyslexia. The kanji is an ideograph. The hiragana and the katakana are phonograms. The reading difficulties

include 2 types. One is a difficulty about reading the kanji. Another is the difficulty about tracing the

reading sequence. This paper proposes a system that presents the Japanese sentences with suitable

presentation method for each pupil with reading difficulties. The main function of the proposed system is 3

levels of highlighting/masking that are independently controlled. The highlighting only is not enough to

prevent the error about the reading sequence of character chunks. The 3 level highlighting/masking enables

to adapt the presentation to wide varieties of reading difficulties. The proposed system also proposes the

function to measure the reading ability of the pupil with recording their operations. This paper proposes the

plan and the implementation of the Japanese text presentation system.

1 INTRODUCTION

There are many pupils with reading difficulty in

Japanese elementary schools. There are many kinds

of difficulties. The big and first one is reading

Japanese characters. Japanese characters are the

construction of hiragana (phonetic character),

katakana (another type of a phonetic character),

kanji (Semantic character) and other characters.

Figure 1 shows the examples of Japanese

characters. The characters in the left group are

hiragana. The characters in the center group are

katakana. In those groups, the characters in the

corresponding positions have same pronunciation.

The characters in the right group are kanji. They

have multiple pronunciations. However, one

pronunciation is same as the other 2 groups. The

first character in the right group means ‘love’. The

second character means ‘up’. The third one does

‘tail’.

The other characters include Arabic numbers,

English alphabet and, etc. The Japanese sentence can

include the words of other languages. The number of

characters used in Japanese sentences is about 1000

in an elementary school. This hugeness is the first

barrier.

Figure 1: Examples of Japanese characters.

The second barrier is the understanding of the

sentence structure. There is no space between words

in Japanese sentences as shown in the top of figure

2. In an elementary school, pupils learn hiragana at

first, and then they do katakana. In the first stage in

elementary schools, the Japanese text-book has a

space between words for the ease of understanding

the structures of the sentences. However, normal

Japanese texts have no space between words.

The top of figure 2 means ‘Cherry blossoms have

opened’. The first character is a kanji character that

means cherry. In Japanese, cherry also means cherry

blossom. The third character is a kanji character that

means ‘open up’. The middle of figure 2 is hiragana

writing of the sentence on the top. We can easily

understand the structure of the sentence on the top of

figure 2 with the help of character type changing and

123

Aoki K. and Murayama S..

JAPANESE TEXT PRESENTATION SYSTEM FOR PERSONS WITH READING DIFFICULTY - Design and Implementation.

DOI: 10.5220/0003902401230128

In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 123-128

ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

the meaning of kanji characters. However, we have

difficulties for understanding the structure of the

middle sentence. The bottom in figure 2 is another

writing that has same pronunciation as the middle.

The meaning of the sentence differs from the top of

figure 2.

Figure 2: Writing examples.

Every pupil has those 2 difficulties at first. In the

long school life, they studied the skill to conquer

those difficulties. Anyway, those 2 difficulties are

large barriers for reading and understanding

Japanese sentences.

Every infant has no knowledge about the

Japanese characters. Every pupil has no knowledge

about the huge number of kanji letters at first. Then,

they learn hiragana, katakana and kanji characters in

a long elementary-school life. The pupils with a

learning disability tendency have difficulty about

reading Japanese sentences. Off cause, some pupils

have difficulty about remembering kanji characters.

Most of the pupils remember kanji characters

gradually. However, pupils with a learning disability

tendency have difficulty with reading Japanese

sentences in the case that they can remember the

kanji characters. In the case, they may have dyslexia.

There may be many causes of the difficulties on

reading Japanese texts. We do not discuss the

causes. We only pay attentions to the methods for

easing their difficulties. We call their difficulties

“reading difficulty” in this paper.

The research about teachers shows that the pupils

with ADSH tendency have difficulty about

following the characters sequentially and

recognizing the grammatical structures (Murayama,

Aoki and Morioka, 2009). In the case, Murayama

and Aoki (2010) showed that the restriction of the

presented text helps to understand the text. Off

cause, there are many types of reading difficulties.

There are many causes about the reading difficulties.

The resulting reading difficulties show the same

symptom that is the difficulty about following the

characters sequentially, recognizing grammatical

structures and reading kanji characters. This paper

proposes the presentation system that eases this

reading difficulty with presenting the Japanese texts

with a proper method for each pupil. The differences

of pupils are ages and disabilities.

For normal non-Japanese students learning

Japanese, there are same problems as the Japanese

pupils with reading difficulties. They also have

difficulties for understanding grammatical structures

and reading kanji characters. The proposed system

helps the students for reading Japanese texts.

This paper describes the design and the

implementation of a visual text presentation system

for persons with reading difficulty in windows

environments. First, this paper evaluates the DAISY

(Digital Accessible Information SYstem) in primary

schools that has the pupils with reading difficulty

(DAISY consortium, 2012). Then, we discuss about

the functions needed in the Japanese text

presentation system. Next, we show the structure of

the proposed Japanese sentence presentation system

and its implementation. Then, this paper discusses

the function of the implementation. And last, we

conclude our work.

2 EVALUATIONS OF DAISY

The DAISY is one implementation of digital talking

book. Figure 3 shows an example of visual

presentation with DAISY. It includes highlighting

function of talking chunk of characters. It reads out

the DAISY contents. It has visual text presenting

functions, also (DeMeglio, Hakkinen and

Kawamura, 2002) (DAISY consortium, 2012). The

DAISY started for helping the people with sight

disability. The DAISY is helpful for pupils with

reading difficulty. However, the DAISY is a digital

talking book. The content must be carefully

prepared. Furthermore, there is a difficulty to make

DAISY contents from electrical texts. The advanced

teachers prepare the DASY contents and use the

DAISY in their courses. However, the preparations

need a large amount of works. It is difficult to use

emerging materials in their courses for the large

preparation works. For example, it is difficult to use

the morning news in the course on the same day.

The interesting fresh materials can attract pupils’

attentions more. The DAISY does not offer such

functions.

The DAISY is a talking book. We can change the

speed of talking. However, the visual presentation

follows the talking. The user cannot control the

visual presentation directly. The user cannot change

the size of a chunk of uninterrupted talk. In the first

stage of elementary schools, most of the pupils like

the short chunk. With the progress of their abilities,

they like longer chunks. We can control the speed of

talking and start and stop of talking. We cannot

change the visual chunk of characters. In figure 3,

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the highlighted chunk is a whole sentence. There is

no smaller chunk in the DAISY.

Figure 3: DAISY visual presentation example.

Another problem about DAISY is the difficulties

of the adjustment for each disability of each pupil.

Each pupil differs on their ages and abilities. For

each pupil, there is the best fit visual presentation.

However, the control about visual presentation is

very limited in DAISY. The DAISY contents can

have a variety of visual presentations. Each visual

presentation needs individual DAISY contents. Each

pupil differs on his ability with his progress. The

DAISY cannot withstand the environment.

The proposed Japanese text visual presentation

system overcomes such problems with a very small

preparation work. The preparation costs almost

nothing. The proposed presentation system offers the

functions that are adapting the material for pupil’s

age and adapting it for pupil’s difficulties. For

adapting the material for pupil’s age, our Japanese

texts need to be constructed with the proper kanji

characters fitting for the age. Adapting the proposed

Japanese text presentation system for pupil’s

difficulties, the amount of information presented at a

time is restricted properly. For the persons with a

dyslexia tendency, the restriction of presented

information is effective to improve the

understandability. Our proposed presentation system

provides the function for restricting presented

information with 3 levels of masking and

highlighting. The only highlighting is not enough for

the person with reading difficulty.

3 PRESENTATION SYSTEM

DESIGN

Our goal is to propose the method that helps pupils

that have difficulties to read Japanese texts. There

are many needs in Japanese elementary schools.

However, the proposed system concentrates on the

difficulties about reading Japanese texts.

The presentation system has functions for

selecting font types, font size, character spacing and

line spacing as NotePad has. For helping the pupil

with ADSH tendency to read, the proposed system

has 3 levels highlitings/maskings. For some types of

reading difficulties, it is effective to decrease the

amount of the presented information at one time.

The DAISY has only the highlighting function.

Figure 4 shows the examples of combinations of

highlighting and masking. The B in figure 4 is a

normal presentation. The E is an example of DAISY

type highlighting. The F is a classical masking. With

the masking method, there is no information about

the masked area. The G is an example of weak

masking. With the masking, we can read the part

masked.

Figure 4: Highlighting and masking examples.

Figure 5 is an example of 1 level highlighting of

DAISY type. The figure 6 is an example of 3 levels

presentation with the combination of a highlighting

and a masking. In figure 6, we easily find the

sentence, comparing with Figure 5. The un-attention

part is less attractive than the attention part. This

type of visual presentation may help to the pupil

with ADSH tendency.

Figure 5: 1 level highlighting.

There are many problems for utilizing the ITC

technology in Japanese elementary schools

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(Murayama et al., 2009). The problems are listed in

Table 1. For solving the problems, the proposed text

presentation system treats only the electronic text. In

Japan, a law forces to prepare the electronic readable

text of text books (Law 2009). Furthermore, there

are many documents accessible through the internet.

There is no paper document for an input in the

proposed system.

Figure 6: 1 level highlighting and 1 level masking with

background coloring.

Table 1: Problems about ICT usability in a special aid

school in Japan.

There is a load concentration into the teacher, who is

good at ICT.

There are a few educational materials for the DAISY.

They do not use the SAVE AS DAISY.

Using OCR for preparing educational materials for

pupils with a learning disability tendency, the

recognition errors make a large check and correct

work.

There are large works for replacing difficult kanji

characters with hiragana.

Using classical ICT tools as the DAISY, we need to

prepare educational materials for each pupil who has a

different age and a different disability.

It is difficult to evaluate the performance.

The proposed Japanese text presentation system

has only 2 functions. As the first row of Table 2, we

restrict the functions of the proposed system. The

proposed system must have some performance

measurements function about pupil. However,

performance measurement about pupil is another big

theme. The teachers around the pupils with reading

difficulties need the objective measurements about

the performance about the pupils. For this purpose,

the proposed system provides the operation logging

function. The operation logs describe the reading

speed at each meaningful chunk of characters.

For decreasing the preparation work about

education materials, the proposed system provides

the online presentation generation from a plain text.

This is the main and most important function. With

this online presentation generation, there is no need

to prepare the educational materials beforehand.

This enables to use the very new materials in a class.

This enables to use one-time materials for

measuring the performance of a pupil. Many

pupils may remember the full text of the many times

used materials as text books. Those remembered

materials cannot be used for evaluating the reading

performance of a pupil. The online presentation

generation enables any new plain text materials at

any time.

Table 2: The plan for covering the problems.

A collection of simple software is better than complex

multi-functional software.

Avoid the usage of OCR.

An educational material presentation system does not

need the special material preparations.

We need an evaluation method/function for evaluating

the performance of a pupil.

This online presentation generation enables to

adapt the presentation for each pupil with different

reading difficulties. DAISY has no function about

adaptation for each pupil.

For adapting the variety of pupils’ ages and

difficulties, the presentation system has the function

to replace the un-studied kanji characters with

hiragana characters. The phonic hiragana character

is first studied character. There is a little difficulty

about reading hiragana.

The operations on the presentation system have

the information about a subject. The proposed

system logs every operation with the time. This log

represents the fluency of the reader.

The presentation system has the

highlighting/masking methods. Many presentation

systems have highlighting methods for distinguish

the point where a reader must look at and pay

attention. Some persons with reading difficulty have

difficulty following the characters in proper

sequence. The highlighting method helps to find the

place to look, but it does not help to prevent to look

at un-proper place.

The proposed system has rich unified

highlighting/masking methods. This enables to help

to look at a proper place and not to look at un-proper

places.

For controlling the amount of information at

each chunk, the proposed system has the function

controlling the size of the chunk of characters in

semantic senses. Japanese text has no word spacing

between semantic chunks of characters. For

automatically making proper highlighting/masking,

there must be understanding of the semantic

structure of the texts. The proposed system uses

MeCab for understanding the semantic structure of

the texts. MeCab is the free Japanese grammatical

parser (Kudo, 2012). With the help of MeCab, the

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proposed system enables to highlighting/masking the

text with the proper size of chunks.

The proposed system has the features listed in

Table 3. The network problem is important Japanese

schools. There is a large limitation about the internet

access. As a result, some cloud based

implementation cannot work. The proposed system

must work without the internet access.

Table 3: The additional plan for adapting the school

environments.

The system must work without network connections.

The function replacing unlearned kanji characters with

hiragana characters.

A semantic collection of characters must keep their

connectivity in a line.

Line breaks must be between the semantic collections.

4 PRESENTATION SYSTEM

IMPLEMENTATION AND ITS

WORKING EXAMPLES

The implementation has 2 inputs and 3 outputs. The

2 inputs are a plain text file and user operations for

controlling the reading places. The 3 outputs are the

text presentation on a visual display, logs about the

operations and the reading out sound. We implement

the proposed Japanese text presentation system on

windows environments.

For using the presentation system, the user must

assign the text file. This is the only normal

preparation to start reading text. Then, the system

displays the first part of the text with the pre-set

font-size, the size of a chunk of character and, etc. If

the sound output is enabled, the system talks the

part.

If there are un-studied kanji characters, the

continuous sequence of kanji characters including

the un-studied kanji characters are replaced

hiragana.

The top in figure 7 is kanji character sequence

represents the name of city. If the second character

is an un-studied kanji, the system replaces the

continuous sequence of kanji character with the

sequence of hiragana as the bottom in figure 7. If we

replace the second character only, we have the

middle in figure 7. It is difficult to understand.

Because, the continuous sequence of kanji character

represent the meaningful chunk. The middle in

figure 7 breaks this rule.

On a visual display, the first meaningful chunk

of character is highlighted at first. The sentence

including the chunk is also highlighted with another

method. The other sentences on a display are

masked as a pre-decided method. Figure 6 is an

example of our standard highlighting/masking setup.

For reading the text, the user only uses the arrow

keys. With typing keys, the highlighted chunk

moves the next chunk. With the move of the

highlighted chunk, the system keeps the display

properly. The system records the key typing with the

time. Afterward, the record shows the reading

performance of the user.

Figure 7: Kanji replacement with hiragana.

The proposed system has a general

highlighting/masking function. At each level, we can

select a free combination of font color, background

color and the non-character region color. The best-fit

presentation differs for each pupil. The user can

search the best-fit presentation easily. The 3 level

highlighting/masking help the user to find the place

to read and understand the structure of the sentence.

Figure 8 shows the layout change with the

presentation character size changes. The reading

chunk stays at the same place. There is no line break

in a semantic chunk of characters.

Figure 8: Layout change with the change of the character

size.

Figure 9 shows the replacing un-studied kanji

characters with hiragana characters. With replacing

kanji characters with hiragana characters, the

number of characters increases.

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Figure 10 shows the scrolling example with the

move of reading chunk of characters. The reading

chunk moves from the last chunk in a sentence to the

first chunk in the next sentence. There is the

previous sentence on the top. On a display, there is 1

line of the previous sentence, the reading sentence

and the following sentences.

Figure 9: Replacing un-studied Kanji characters with

Hiragana characters.

Figure 10: Scrolling example.

We have the experiments in a Japanese

elementary school. The subjects are a 10 years-old

girl and 2 boys. They attend a special aid class. They

have some reading difficulties. One boy has used

DAISY in a long term. All of them like the 3 level

highlighting/masking. They have no difficulties

about using the text presentation system. Teachers

have some difficulties about using new ITC

methods. The proposed text presentation system

enables to use a same article in a wide range of

pupils. This helps to ease the emotional

estrangement of the pupils with reading difficulties.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This paper proposes the Japanese text presentation

system for pupils with reading difficulties. The

proposed Japanese text presentation system makes

reading Japanese texts to be easy. We need little

preparation works beforehand. The proposed

Japanese text presentation system implements all

needs of teachers in Japanese elementary schools.

The small number of experimental uses shows that

the presentation system is a helpful tool in

elementary-school environments for decreasing the

reading difficulties of a pupil and estimating the

performance of the reading ability of the pupil.

The next step of this research is a wide

distribution of the software. However, this needs not

only the software distribution, but also the

distribution of the method to use the software

effectively.

REFERENCES

DAISY consortium. (2012). DAISY Multimedia. Retrieved

from: http://www.daisy.org/mutimedia

DeMeglio, M., Hakkinen, M., Kawamura, H. (2002).

Accessible Interface Design: Adaptive Multimedia

Information System (AMIS). COMPUTERS HELPING

PEOPLE WITH SPECIAL NEEDS, Lecture Notes in

Computer Science. Springer, 2398, 319-330.

Kudo, T. (2012). MeCab: Yet Another Part-of-Speech and

Morphological Analyzer. Retrieved from: http://mecab.

sourceforge.net/

Law. (2009). Overview of the Act on Promotion of

Distribution of Specified Books, etc. Used as Textbooks

for Disabled Children and Students. Retrieved from:

http://www.bunka.go.jp/chosakuken/pdf/tokuteitosyo_f

ukyu_gaiyo.pdf

Murayama, S., Aoki, K. (2010). Real Time Image

Presentation System for Persons with a Learning-

Disabled Tendency. IEICE-ET, 109(387), ET2009-96.

25-29.

Murayama, S., Aoki, K., Morioka, N. (2009). Image

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