 Hello everyone and welcome to this session on innovations in reading and writing technologies for inclusion. What should the learning technologists know? And delivering the talk today is Dominic Lukesh from the University of Oxford. So it's my pleasure to hand over to you Dominic. Well, thank you. Thank you Claire and welcome everybody and thanks for joining. I do feel free to comment in the stream as we go. And also, if you want to tweet at me, my Twitter handle is at techcheck. Now to start with a quick caveat is this is just going to be a very quick top level overview. There is quite a lot of things out there that are happening, but I thought it would be good to just get the key points out there. So this may be quite quick, but if you are wondering where you can find out more, you can go to bit.ly slash Oxford Reading Lab, all one word, and there is a guide there that will guide you through many of these same topics. So what are we talking about when we talk about innovations in reading? And for many people, and in fact, for me as well, it is things like that. It's all these wonderful e-readers, tablets, apps and so on. So actually, if I work with students about readings and the people who are actually doing all of the readings, they often struggle with some of the basic strategies of how to approach reading, what to make, how to approach writing, study in general. So I would like to sort of first start with the assumption that actually strategies should come before technologies and even be a bit of mindful that while technologies can be very helpful particularly from the inclusion perspective, they can also get in the way and I want to explore some of these things. Now we have now, I have just yesterday a paper that I wrote about some of these issues came out. You can get it on bit.ly slash reading affordances 2021. And I sort of outlined some of the same issues including some of the hardware and software there. So again, you're welcome to read that and I will welcome any comments on that. So let's start then not with the technology, but with reading. And I would like to sort of present that's again something that I've outlined in the paper in quite a bit of detail the question of what actually is reading, because reading, I would like to think of that as a multiple articulated activity. And we often only think of it as the top thing which is decoding, right? That's where you get a bit of text on the page and you sort of transfer those words, those letters into words into your mind. But actually, there's also the business of understanding which is not necessarily the same thing, but also planning and deciding which bits to pay attention to the strategies of that. And those are all things that are part of reading. And it would be a mistake to only think of it in terms of the first articulation, the articulation of decoding. But while we're reading, we're doing all of those things. And of course, we're doing it in multiple modalities. So we're doing it with text. Sometimes we add audio to the text. Sometimes we only listen to, but these days, many people often read on video. So that's another place where reading happens. And so when all of these things are put together, we can start thinking about what it is that actually makes reading easier. And I like to summarize that in the four broad areas. And the first one is enlarge, listen, navigate, and strategize. And so enlarge is very simple. That is a way of reducing barriers to the first articulation, decoding. And here's an example. If I ask you to quickly and fluently read this text, you will struggle. You'll find it very difficult. And if I do this, all of a sudden, you are much more comfortable. You're not feeling that extra pressure. And of course, sometimes you don't have to focus all of your mental energy on decoding. You can actually focus on the meaning. And the metaphor for this is very easy. If you're driving down a narrow road, you have to go much slower. And if you have your entire motorway for yourself, you can speed up quite a lot because all of your processing, your cognition is freed up because of all of that space. So here's an example of how that actually translates into real reading with technology. So here, for example, as a blog post, as you can see, there's lots of things there. There's very long lines, small text. But if I use something like Instapaper, I can immediately transform that into a much more comfortable environment for decoding. And if I send it to my phone, which is what I actually do, then all of a sudden I can also get another benefit, like a large font, large line spacing, shorter lines, all of those things make reading easier. So Instapaper, Microsoft Edge has now introduced something called an Immersive Reader, which is something that I've been recommending to people to switch to. You can switch to it without any cost, because it pretty much is BlackWords compatible with Chrome, your extensions and everything. And you get something like this. You start with a page like that, and all of a sudden you get a page like this, where all of the other things disappear. You can increase text spacing, increase, decrease font size and backgrounds and so on. But you get even more things. You, for example, get things like the focus mode, which again helps you, helps with the decoding bit. So again, I highly recommend that, recommending it to all students, and I've been getting some really good feedback from them. There's also some language support. So for people for whom English is their first language, they can highlight nouns, syllabiify, all of these things also help people with dyslexia, as well as those whose, for whom English is not the first language. And it works in foreign languages. If you're learning Russian, it will do this thing for you in Russian and check perhaps like the less so. So that is the enlarging bit, the space, adding more space. But reading with your ears is the modality bit. And so I talked about how audio is an important modality for reading for many people. And now again, Microsoft Edge comes to the rescue. It has this thing called Read Allow. It's part of the Immersion Reader. And I'm not sure you probably won't be able to read this, hear this, but actually the new Edge has these natural voices, which are very good and I highly recommend using that. And it also works on PDFs. And it also is built to Microsoft Word, so you can read your own writing with your ears. And it helps a lot. I highly recommend you try them. It's quite a revolution in a way in speech synthesis. You get the same things on an iPad. So many people don't realize that any text on an iPad or an iPhone can be read out with something called Speak Screen. It's in settings. Again, a great advantage. If you do this a lot, you may want to think about, or you may recommend your students and academics, something like Voice Dream Reader, which is a voice-focused reading app on Android. There's something I like called Ad Voice Allowed. And it even has a feature such as this. For example, it lets you crop out the footers and headers, which is quite an important thing for the listening experience. And people often like listening at higher speed, cropping and learning how to navigate the text by skipping and pausing. All of those things are part of that reading process. All of those things are worth exploring. So I highly recommend you not only know about these apps, but go out and try them, see for yourself how it works, and so on. I'm going to take a sip of water while we move on to the next topic, which is navigation. And so all text have structure, and not all bits of the text are equally important. And so we need to be able to navigate around. So for example, if you're starting creating a document or if you have a Word document, always make sure there are headings in it, because then you can turn on the navigation pane in Microsoft Word and easily navigate around text. And of course, also make sure that you produce the PDFs that have bookmarks, and also learn and help your students learn where the bookmarks are in different PDF readers. So in the Chrome PDF here, it's over here. In the Microsoft Edge PDF reader, it's in another place and other PDF readers. Again, each of them have it in a different place, but it's worth knowing where they are. So again, people can learn to navigate. And that leads me to the most important part of what makes it really easy, and that is strategies. And that's the first thing I tell any students who come to me and ask me for advice, is to learn what the right strategies are. And so for example, if you look in any academic skills, writing guide, you're going to see something like this. Read as intelligently as possible, skim, read a document before reading a line by line, decide which bits are more important, and go about your reading in a strategic way. And so I'd like to summarize this into three modes of reading that we need to be aware of when we think about technology and how it can help and get in the way. So the first mode is what I like to call linear or comprehensive, sometimes it's been called intensive. And that's the sort of thing when you read, as if you're reading fiction from start to finish, as if it was a story, and the sort of thing that kind of looks like you should be reading any text. But actually, that is not necessarily the best way to approach, particularly for academic reading. So I already mentioned skimming. So that's reading for just get a sense of the overall meaning quickly, get a map of the document so that not everything is as foreign to you as also to your readers. And that is often the strategy then to decide where you need to do a bit more linear reading or a bit more strategic reading. And to get to those spaces, you can also use scanning. And that's often, that's reading for specific information. Often, when people come back to a document, because that's often needs to happen. People don't just read things once, they have to come back. You need to find the right information. Those things are all important. And so often when it comes to reading strategies, the skimming and scanning are much more important than the linear comprehensive reading, but we often underestimate that. Most of the digital reading interfaces, particularly like the Kindle, sort of assume your reading from the first sentence to the last one. And that's actually interesting enough why digital textbooks are so slow to take off. They're quite hard to actually navigate in that strategic way which textbooks should be navigated in. And so the question then is how does technology come in when it comes to the strategies which are so important. And I'd like to first quickly mention the question of affordances. And so affordances is the sort of property of an object that allows the user to interact with it in a way that they can achieve their goal without consciously deliberating. It's kind of, when I want to pick up my gear, I don't have to process it. I don't have to think about it. I think it's just going to go as if naturally they grasp it. Even though it's not really natural, I had to learn it. And this is the same thing goes with print, with reading. So this is an old, this is a schedule from an old alt and they can see all things that were happening with it, right? It's all folded. It fits into my pocket. I can sort of scribble on it and I can see everything at once. And this is the same, this is a digital schedule of an alt summit from that same year. As you can see, I can search in there, but I cannot have that easy. I don't have that easy side-by-side view. I'm certainly going to float into my pocket. So there are many things that I lose with the digital transfer. The same goes for e-books, right? So here is an example. If you have an e-book, what happens when you put it on a Kindle? Well, there's loads of things that are happening. There's things like physicality. The book weighs more or less. There's things like touch, the thing what ink does, visibility, easy ways of moving around and so on. So those are all things that are happening. Your fingers are kind of all over the place. You can stick them in different parts of the book as you're reading. And all of those things matter. And most of the tools that we're using actually don't take that into account. And so we must look at them from that perspective as well. So for example, the Kindle now has a new navigation system, but it took them 13 years to do it. So it's much easier now to jump around on the Kindle if you're a Kindle user. But that took a long time before you have to do a little scrolling. But this is the sort of thing you could do with your physical book. And that's what the students kind of intuitively know, or any user of textbooks knows that they can have your fingers stuck into different places, quickly jump back and forth. So those are all the things that are important. And publishers really seem to be ignorant of this. So for example, this is a really great book on reading and making notes by Gene Gottfried. But the e-book is really kind of hard to navigate. There's a table of contents, but you can see it's not really that same experience. That doesn't give you that physicality. It doesn't give you some of the pocketability that that physical book gives you. So I just wanted to have that as a preface to now that we finally look at some of the reading hardware and software that maybe many of you came here for. So what can you read with or on? Well, so obviously there's computers or smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and scanners. I want to mention some of these. So let's have a quick comparison. So computers, they're always, always there. Everybody has a computer. Well, almost everybody. There are many tools out there, but it's not good in terms of posture. The screen isn't very friendly. Smartphones are much better because they're portable. They're flexible. They have a small screen, which can be sort of a negative here, but also a good thing. The battery is, you know, can be limited, particularly if you do a lot of reading on your smartphone. And of course, the screen again, there's a bit of a clear that some people find particularly discouraging. Now, tablets may be much better because they're portable. Like smartphones, they have a large screen, which is an easily side-by-side viewing. Many of them have pen options. So you can all of a sudden add that element of physicality, but there's again the screen glare, which is solved by a dedicated e-reader, which is like the Kindle, but larger. There's no screen glare. The battery lasts forever. There's often a touch-pen interface, but unfortunately, just a single function. There's so refresh and they can be quite expensive for what they do. And then you have, of course, you have scanners that can do other things for you. I'll show you some of them that are standalone. They work on printed text, which none of these other things do, but they're very single-purpose and they're very expensive because of that. So let's look at some of the devices out there that we're actually, we're starting this digital reading lab and we bought some of these to test them and to see what the benefits are. So the one that people have heard about is the Remarkable, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful pieces of hardware I've ever held in my hands. It just feels, as its name indicates, remarkable. It's not the best. There's a basic reading and writing experience. I think it's fine, but it is really not the best out there, unfortunately. The software lets it down. It's not quite as fast. It doesn't have any side lighting. So that's a big disadvantage. So you do have to have an external light. While Kobo has come up with Kobo Ellipse, which is a new device, it's not nearly as pretty as the Remarkable. It has the advantage you can get books onto it from your library, local library. It has more options and it's a bit faster. So if somebody was choosing a 10-inch e-reader, this is the one I would recommend. Now the one that I particularly like is the Books Max from Onyx Books. Books Max Lumie. It is illuminated just like the Kobo. So you don't need an external light, but it's large. It's 13-inch and it's actually where, you know, I mentioned the importance of size. And none of these readers kind of let you easily resize without having to sort of zoom in, but this one gives you a big enough size. It is at least equivalent to paper. And it lets you see scene side by side as well. So this is perhaps unfortunately the most expensive. It also works as a, but I would recommend that one if you can swing the price. There's a new version of Lumix Books 2, which has good reviews and can also be used as an external screen, which you might like. And so here you can see one of the advantages side by side version of that as well. Now, if you have a printed book, then you sort of, you're stuck, right? None of these things will help you unless you scan it in, but there is a great little device called C-Pen and there is the standalone version of it, but there's the one that we bought for testing is connected to your smartphone and you essentially swipe it across any text and it will copy it into your phone and also read it out to you. So that's quite a useful thing for dealing with printed books and printed text. Now, OrCam is another new device, which is the C-Pen costs a little over a hundred pounds. This one costs several thousand, over a thousand pounds, but this one is aimed at people with severe visual impairments and there are different versions of it and it will read out the whole page. It's a slightly different process, but we're testing that right now. But then of course we have tablets, right? And of course the tablet to tablet them all is the iPad and to be honest, I'm not a big fan of the Apple ecosystem, but the iPad has certain advantages because of the software and that is available on it. So I will mention some of these later. Of course, it is the most expensive option. What you see here costs over a thousand pounds more than a new laptop. The other thing that we're thinking about when we're investigating different ways of engaging with text and with the digital text, we think about touch, which is another sort of modality. And so we have all these different stylists and pens and we're looking at them and letting students try them and see which ones they like. There are active ones that are quite expensive, a hundred or a hundred pounds or more, but they're also interesting innovations and passive stylists. That's quite surprising. I was just showing these and actually recently, I was showing these off at a showcase and these kind of attracted the most attention because they cost 10 pounds each rather than a hundred. And of course there's also the more traditional Wacom style tablets, mostly from Wacom. So I would definitely, definitely is another area to look at. So we have just a few minutes left. I wanted to mention the apps, which of course is what you're always doing the reading in. And not, you know, always have the option to install apps, but I forgot to mention with the MaxBooks Loomi, it has a Google Play Store access, so you can actually install any reading apps on that. But the app that actually caused me to buy an iPad is the margin node. And as you can see, this is all of a sudden, this is the first app that I've seen that doesn't think of reading in a purely linear manner. It actually lets you highlight things, move those highlights into mind map that can be exported into other mind maps. It even has sort of OCR for an extra fee, but you can annotate in all sorts of ways. So it's a very useful app. It's not too expensive. And it also works on, it's on iPad and Max, certainly no Windows version. There is an alternative to that, which is called liquid text, I quite like as well. And it really, they really kind of got the touch affordances quite right. So this is an example of what it can do, what liquid text can do. They can, it can, you can easily navigate by touch. It's really a touch-first interface. For the swipe, write comments and margins, but then have the power to organize them together without ever losing your source. What if comparing different pages meant just squeezing them together? Right. So this is, this is liquid text and it really works well. And this one is available on Windows as well as Mac as an iPad. So I highly recommend these things. Sadly, when I recommend these to students, they end up loving them and they say, oh, okay, I want to read my, the library e-books on them. And of course we have DRM for that. So this is the library e-books. You can only download often, often you can download a chapter or two, but never the whole book. The interfaces are really bad. And of course the digital rights, all the digital rights management software is just has not kept up pace with the innovation. So if it supports DRM, it usually isn't a good reading experience. So sadly, publishers really shame on you. They should do better. And then finally, I want to mention workflows because we often only think of reading and the whole sort of, as the moment of reading, but actually there's so much more. And I would say the workflows are even more important than the tools, because if you can't integrate the tool into your reading and learning process, then you will find it very difficult. You will find it very difficult to actually make the most of it. And Amazon Pioneer showed us with a Kindle that this is an important thing. And they let us buy it, buy books on the Kindle without having to do anything. So that is something that we can learn from. If you can buy the books right there, there's no great barrier. We get the benefit. So what are some of the types of workflows for reading? So how do you get the books onto an e-reader? Well, that makes a lot of difference. That's important using some like drug books or OneDrive or Google Drive. How do you get the books to open in the right app? Which on the iPad, sadly, isn't always a straightforward thing. So how do you make sure they're in the right app? How do you get your annotations from the app into the place where you store your notes? How do you get the annotations into notes? And of course, how do you actually integrate all these into memory? And this kind of is very app-specific and very platform-specific. But again, when you're sort of investigating these things and helping students and academics to make the most of these things, think about what are the workflows, and those also have to be learned, also have to be focused on. I want to mention just one app that has emerged. There's a lot of innovation in this space. And the one that I particularly like is ReadWise. It's not free. There's no freemium option here, but I pay for it myself. And this is a system that gets all of your notes from all sorts of sources, from your Kindle, from your Goodreads, from Instapaper, from Pocket, if you use that from Twitter, Medium, Hypothesis. And then it collates them all into your highlights into one place. And then it gives you a way to get little reminders, like flashcards with those quotes. And I find that very useful. Every day, I sort of review some of my past readings that way. And then you can also export them into your note-taking app, like Evernote, Rome, or Notion, which is the one that I use. So these are just a whistle-stop really fast, lightning-fast store of some of the innovations in reading and also the context of the reading strategies and reading needs. So with that, I'm going to say thank you. Feel free to tweet at me, ask any questions, ask any questions right now. But my final words of wisdom is, strategies really should come before the technologies. But if you're interested in technologies, go to Bitly slash Oxford Reading Lab. And that's an evolving page as well. So hopefully you'll be adding things there as we go. And thank you for posting that link. Thank you very much, Dominic, for that talk. Wow, so much expertise you're sharing there. It's really great to see that accessibility and inclusion is so much at the forefront of education at the moment. And it's really interesting as well what you pointed out, how it's all tailored towards the linear reading and doesn't really take into account those reading affordances. And also, thank you for all those recommendations. You've saved all of us so much time and research. It looked like liquid text was possibly the favored one. Have you actually seen students using this? Yes, I've recommended both liquid text and margin note, depending on the advantage on what you want. To be honest, liquid text was my first love of reading. But they've redesigned the interface and I don't like it as much, but it's your only option on Windows. I margin note, I slightly prefer, but margin certainly doesn't have those nice touch, squeezey things. But it does have the export into mind maps. So I have seen students don't do that a lot on their reading. And one of the things I didn't mention about all of them, you can combine multiple documents with the pro versions. Both of these are paid. Liquid text is free for a bit more features, but then it's more expensive if you want to get the paid version. And they also, of course, introducing subscriptions as well. So those are things out there. Yeah, absolutely. Julie mentioned how she loves to use Kindle on her iPad because there's so many new features. Are there any, have you explored these new features and are there any that you'd like to highlight? Yeah, well, I think with the Kindle, the Kindle I think is more of an example of kind of a workflow. So with the Kindle app on the iPad is kind of slightly an afterthought for Amazon. So I think most of the reading that people do on Kindles are on the Kindle hardware. But of course, the app is improving. And the one thing I want to recommend, if using an iPad, you can get that screen reading option. So I mentioned that speak screen. And it works that you swipe from the top of the screen and it will actually read it out to you with your chosen voice. And so you can get that text to speech that way, that way out there. Yeah, absolutely. So I have a question. What would you say is the minimum that people can do to make their documents more accessible? Structure. That's number one. And the thing you always have control over, right? So make sure all of your documents always have ample headings. They are marked with heading styles. When you export your PDFs, make sure that the PDFs have the bookmarks. So in word, never print your PDFs. That always makes it worse. Always do the save as PDF and make sure you check the options to export the headings as bookmarks. So that is the number one thing. Also use more bullet points. If you have a long list and you put it in a paragraph in a sort of narrative structure, nobody needs a list as a narrative. Just make it a list. So more bullet points, more structure. So those are just like number two things you can do because you always have control over them. I always say shorter lines and bigger text. But sometimes you don't have control over those because you're writing for the web page or have a template you have to follow. But these two things will make this more readable and navigable for more people. And also easier for you to review and get a better sense of where your text goes. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So of all those recommendations that you made, what's your favorite? Well, I think my favorite is, well, the one that I've sort of had the most joy out of recently is Readwise because it lets me so integrate all of those things together. And so that would be the thing. And of course, and I think Marginote is also my favorite. So those are the two things. I did literally buy an iPad because I'm not a big fan of the Apple ecosystem, but I bought an iPad so that I can get Marginote. I can just get those good apps. And sadly, there is no Android equivalent. There are good, decent Android reading apps, but none of the ones that are kind of pushing the envelope and thinking about reading in a more kind of a strategic way. Brilliant. Thank you. So there's no further questions, but if anybody would like to continue this conversation, you can go ahead on Discord. And as Dominic mentioned earlier, you can contact him on Twitter. I'm just going to share that link again for you. And Dominic, lots of people are saying thank you for a really interesting talk. So I'd like to say thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise with us. And we do have one question coming in actually that we can do have time to answer. Yes, I have one principle for PowerPoint readability. I see that people are asking, what is the most important way to improve PowerPoint slides for readability? My principle for this is as much as possible, think in terms of one slide, one blood point. So if you have a slide with five texts, five bullet points that each of them are texts, make that title a separate slide, and then each slide should be should be a bullet point. And the principle there is from the multimedia principle is the idea is the sort of is the coherence principle and cohesion principle. So make things, people, what you're talking about is on the screen when you're talking about it and not other things you're not talking about. I guess that's kind of the, that's the one thing. But of course you will make it less useful as a handout because this slide show that you just saw has 97 slides. So that is, that is a downside of that. 97, well, you handled that well. Thank you very, very much. And enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you everybody for joining as well. Thank you.