Research on More Understandable Shosaiyomi, Explanatory Expressions Used in Screen Readers for Visually Impaired Persons

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Shosaiyomi is a set of expressions used to explain Kanji characters to blind PC users phonetically. The purposes of our research are to analyze the factors which affect the comprehensibility of shosaiyomi, develop a new set of shosaiyomi based on the analysis and evaluate it.1. We analyzed the word familiarity and components of shosaiyomi of screen reader products and found that as the degrees of difficulty increase, (1) the word familiarity lowers, and (2) the numbers of components and their combinations increase.2. We performed a survey on familiarity of elementary school children with words that were selected from "Educational Fundamental Vocabulary" and found that the average of word familiarity significantly changes in accordance with the grade in which the words first appear in the textbooks.3. We have conducted a Kanji writing test with adults as subjects. Their average correct rate was higher than that of elementary school children by 30%. It shows that the lower performance by … More school children stemmed from their relatively smaller vocabulary.4. Taking vocabulary and word familiarity characteristics of school children into account, we developed a new set of shosaiyomi for 1006 Educational Kanji characters. To evaluate it, a Kanji writing test with school children as subjects was conducted. The result was that the average correct rate in this test was higher than that in the test with shosaiyomi of conventional screen reader products.5. Taking vocabulary and word familiarity characteristics of the users into consideration, we developed a new set of shosaiyomi for 2965 JIS 1 level Kanji characters. To evaluate it, we conducted a Kanji writing test with university students as subjects. As a result, a set of shosaiyomi comprising words with higher familiarity gained a significantly higher average correct rate than another set comprising of words with lower familiarity.6. We proposed a new strategy of explaining the meaning of paired Kanji characters by the unit of word. Prototype program with this function gained favorable comments from the test users. Less