 So, today I'm going to present to you my research that started as a thesis project and has moved on to active research for quite some time, and it's called Sea Word Reading, and it seeks to address literacy problems through typography. But before I can go much further, I have to tell you a story first of how it all began. Let's imagine it's 10 a.m. on Tuesday morning and you're sitting at your desk in the third grade, preparing to take the big history test on the journeys of Christopher Columbus. You're studying many hours and actively participating in class discussions and watching all the PBS specials on the early days of Christopher Columbus, you're ready to take the test. There you sit as the teacher places a sheet of paper in front of you that's full of words that have to be decoded in order for you to understand the questions being asked. But try as you may to decipher the questions for the most part they're just incomprehensible, and at that moment you reside to the fact that you've just failed another test, but you can't understand why it is that you can't read. Now to most of us, this sounds like a foreign experience, however to Caleb, it's a way of life. You see, Caleb at the time was a smart and witty nine-year-old son of one of my dearest friends, and he along with 20% of school-age population, one out of five, suffer from dyslexia. He actually came home and said the reason why he kept failing the test is because of the way that they laid out the page. And me being a communication designer, I'm like, well, let me make a template then that'll help resolve this issue. And while I looked further into the issue, while the page layout wasn't the problem, I realized that there are many things that we do as communication designers that maybe could aid in the teaching of young. So as I began my own research and just understanding the problem, my heart just grew even more for diving into this. And I saw statistics of 36% and 28% of eighth graders reading below the average level. That means they can't even read a newspaper. And what's near and dear to my heart, the African-American community, 84% are reading up below the basic reading level. I knew I wanted to jump in and to do something or try to do something. In the research, it showed all of the connections between getting them hooked on early reading skills and delinquency later in life. There are studies that show if a black male in the inner city is not reading by the third grade, he's got a 50-50 shot of going to jail as he progresses forward. And all of those things scared me. And so as I looked into reading, I realized that it's both environmental and biological, the factors that lie in. And so over time, I have found myself collaborating with many people. But this is the collaborative team I've been working with, educational psychologists, literary specialists, as well as interaction designers to help just try and address some things. The heart of my research began with this study that I found that took place in 1970 that dispelled the myth that dyslexia was a visual perception problem. And it outlined, here's the issues related to dyslexics reading. And I realized I could probably do some designing for about three of these things. Which led me to my first tool that I have been testing and is in use in public school systems right now. The heart of the tool starts with queuing the child to remember what sound belongs to what letter form. So if they trace these letters in the way that they've been talked to write, it will unlock hidden clues. For example, magnet, magnifying glass, milk. When you say these things loud, you can hear the mmm sound in it. So it's embedding these hidden clues into typographic letter forms. Here we go, peach, peepod, pie. What's the common sound that I hear when I say it aloud? So I'm queuing students to figuring out for themselves what sound belongs to what letter form. This led me to developing a learning tool or application that teachers can use. It consists of four different levels. And on the first level, they began this association of type to image. And on level two and three, they work on building words. And at any juncture, they can't remember what sound. Again, they can access the hidden clues. And then the last level is the storybook level where they can use or find these active, these hidden clues if they need it as their decoding. This tool does have a teacher component where it tracks students' behaviors so that they can identify where the child is truly struggling and come back and work with them one on one. So it's the seeing images in typography over time. It took about a year and a half to visualize all the 44 sounds of the English language with my graduate student and I. We had to figure out a series of images to pair to each sound so that when they set them aloud, they can hear that sound and cue them to figuring it out. Quite a task, but it was a lot of fun. Again, this side of reading and looking at a story and not knowing what sound it makes, you can click on like these hidden drawers and access these hidden cues. This level and programming this level made me realize that I needed to keep pushing with my research because we were manually programming these stories so that they could have this feature. And I want to get to a position where a teacher could write any story they want and have access to hidden cues to help the students be able to read. This tool is actively being used in a lot of different locations. There are five schools in Singapore using it with bilingual kids as well as many inner city schools and organizations inside of Cincinnati. It also won the 2015 Cincinnati Innovates Award. So here's just a shot of us being in the schools. So during the day, I go teach typography at the University of Cincinnati and about when the kids get out in the inner city, I go down there and I teach reading with type. And it's fun. We work with pre-K to first grade students and we're making a difference. If you look at the one chart in terms of spelling, there was a huge gap at the top of between the high and the low kids. And after Seaworth reading, we all but closed the gap in terms of them actually being able to read and it had many other significant improvements. But pushing forward into the other types of research that I'm working on, I had to reach back to my thesis and stuff that I had made back in the day. And one of the inspirations for a lot of things was Natasha's French read regular, which sought to distinguish the letter forms that look similar to each other and the way that she was creating the typography. Back in the day, I had created my own typeface that I call phonetical that was supposed to cue a reader as to how to pronounce it. Look at the O's in these words. When you say hour, you draw jobs long. Ah. When you say to, it spreads wide. And when you say chosen, oh, it stays rounded. So I'm trying to cue them as to how to pronounce it. Now, ultimately, this did not work because it's a bend and a map typeface and that was one of the restraints of the class I was taking in graduate school. Some other experiments that I was doing that's leading up to what I'm working on now is how to make tactile pages that engage the clues. So if they touch the letter forms, it would tell them whether the A was long because they put their hands in the groove and it causes them to move their hands this way. Kinetic memory versus something being short. Did experiments of how do I visualize this on screen and if they need the help they could pull out these cues that are like drawers for them to give them just more of a hint that this is long versus the E is ghosted back because it is something that is silent. Here's some other pictures of the tactile type. You can see the points on it because that's short and so they get that feeling in their fingers when something is short. You see this word bacon often that's like my favorite word, favorite food so I got to put it in there if I'm designing. I even tried to visualize how that could be seen inside of the screen, that tactile page. If they put their mouse over the type, it only allowed them to pull their arms horizontally to say long versus if they went off and tried to touch the E, it would be something where it actually repelled the mouse because it's something that's unspoken in terms of what the word is. So all of that is leading me forward to things that I'm working on now and totally am not finished with so I'm just sharing with you where it's headed. I'm developing a typeface called ortho and ortho is an early education reading font. Ortho seeks to visualize the five different orthographic patternings to reading. Orthographic patternings are just big words for long vows and short vows and controlled R's and final E's. So the way this typeface works is that it uses artificial intelligence so that as someone types, they can see the sequence of letters and snap to whatever the rule is and so they can see something that is sounding long here. So just a few other examples of it typing out and of course bacon is going to pop up here because I have to do it. Just of other words that they're learning at the early reading level of how do you embed cues inside of a typeface to cue someone to understanding how to pronounce it. This typeface I'm thinking has alternative glyphs and maximizes that so that the teacher still has the ability to type set something in a regular which is ultimate goal of how someone would want to read it but they can also look at it in the spatial view or take a look at it in the contrasted view that really tries to magnify that orthographic pattern or something that is more textural that could be touched. If a student was reading on screen and a teacher made a sentence if they needed the access again they can pull it out like a drawer and the typeface animates itself to show whatever is the rule and when they're done with it they can put it away and keep on reading. So it's this idea that these letter forms can be dynamic to hint or suggest to people how to pronounce it. I do believe that there's a typeface that I will be working on that allows this to be typeable so that teachers can type out their own story. A few other experiments that's in my future but are experiments that I created back in my thesis time is this idea of tactile type. What if I could cue to them that B is squishy this way and P is squishy this way. When someone is struggling to read the traditional manner of helping them understand this says this doesn't work but engaging some other type of muscle memory will help. So I'm here asking the question of squishy as well as using audio on a monopeia sounds as well as motion images to just give them clues and to remembering what sound belongs to what letter form. What if they could touch it and as they begin to touch it they can only interact with it a certain way so they can learn the differences between the representations of the different sounds. I see this being a huge possibility if I look at VR and VR's role in education and then there's going to be a point where they could literally squish it and watch the letter forms touch and it be their own letter world. Also as I look at the future of AR and what reading glasses could ultimately mean in relationship to typography it could be quite interesting that when they need these cues overlaid over any type of typography they could access and see them. So I spend a lot of time in the school surveying, testing out, getting feedback from the teachers. A nice thing that has come out from interviewing a great deal. I had to do 100 interviews last summer as I was looking at who are the people that would be using it. 76.6% of the teachers stated that Seaworth reading addresses several of the issues that a struggling reader faces. The current stage is that we've been in the schools for several years using it and we have great stories to tell of students that were really low that have been brought up to much higher state than where they are. The teacher and the student app were just completing now and it should be in the Apple store soon and we're in the process of launching a business so we can continue to make tools that become disruptors to the traditional way of teaching. This is just one of the first classes that I had when I started this journey so I just want to thank you with that. But also these two little jewels of mine they always give me raw and crude feedback as to whether they can understand the letters as I'm making them so they're part of my design team as well. So thank you very much. Thank you.