Assessing text and web accessibility for people with autism spectrum disorder

A thesis submitted in partial ful lment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyPeople with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience di culties with reading comprehension and information processing, which a ect their school performance, employability and social inclusion. The main goal of this work is to investigate new ways to evaluate and improve text and web accessibility for adults with autism. The rst stage of this research involved using eye-tracking technology and comprehension testing to collect data from a group of participants with autism and a control group of participants without autism. This series of studies resulted in the development of the ASD corpus, which is the rst multimodal corpus of text and gaze data obtained from participants with and without autism. We modelled text complexity and sentence complexity using sets of features matched to the reading di culties people with autism experience. For document-level classi cation we trained a readability classi er on a generic corpus with known readability levels (easy, medium and di cult) and then used the ASD corpus to evaluate with unseen user-assessed data. For sentencelevel classi cation, we used for the rst time gaze data and comprehension testing to de ne a gold standard of easy and di cult sentences, which we then used as training and evaluation sets for sentence-level classi cation. The ii results showed that both classi ers outperformed other measures of complexity and were more accurate predictors of the comprehension of people with autism. We conducted a series of experiments evaluating easy-to-read documents for people with cognitive disabilities. Easy-to-read documents are written in an accessible way, following speci c writing guidelines and containing both text and images. We focused mainly on the image component of these documents, a topic which has been signi cantly under-studied compared to the text component; we were also motivated by the fact that people with autism are very strong visual thinkers and that therefore image insertion could be a way to use their strengths in visual thinking to compensate for their di culties in reading. We investigated the e ects images in text have on attention, comprehension, memorisation and user preferences in people with autism (all of these phenomena were investigated both objectively and subjectively). The results of these experiments were synthesised in a set of guidelines for improving text accessibility for people with autism. Finally, we evaluated the accessibility of web pages with di erent levels of visual complexity. We provide evidence of existing barriers to nding relevant information on web pages that people with autism face and we explore their subjective experiences with searching the web through survey questions

Attention-Based Applications in Extended Reality to Support Autistic Users: A Systematic Review

With the rising prevalence of autism diagnoses, it is essential for research to understand how to leverage technology to support the diverse nature of autistic traits. While traditional interventions focused on technology for medical cure and rehabilitation, recent research aims to understand how technology can accommodate each unique situation in an efficient and engaging way. Extended reality (XR) technology has been shown to be effective in improving attention in autistic users given that it is more engaging and motivating than other traditional mediums. Here, we conducted a systematic review of 59 research articles that explored the role of attention in XR interventions for autistic users. We systematically analyzed demographics, study design and findings, including autism screening and attention measurement methods. Furthermore, given methodological inconsistencies in the literature, we systematically synthesize methods and protocols including screening tools, physiological and behavioral cues of autism and XR tasks. While there is substantial evidence for the effectiveness of using XR in attention-based interventions for autism to support autistic traits, we have identified three principal research gaps that provide promising research directions to examine how autistic populations interact with XR. First, our findings highlight the disproportionate geographic locations of autism studies and underrepresentation of autistic adults, evidence of gender disparity, and presence of individuals diagnosed with co-occurring conditions across studies. Second, many studies used an assortment of standardized and novel tasks and self-report assessments with limited tested reliability. Lastly, the research lacks evidence of performance maintenance and transferability.Comment: [Accepted version] K. Wang, S. J. Julier and Y. Cho, "Attention-Based Applications in Extended Reality to Support Autistic Users: A Systematic Review," in IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 15574-15593, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.314772

Characteristics of visual function in Asperger’s syndrome and the autism spectrum

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and Asperger’s syndrome is part of the spectrum of autism disorders. This thesis aims to: • Review and investigate current theories concerning visual function in individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and high functioning autism spectrum disorder and to translate the findings into clinical practice by developing a specific protocol for the eye examination of individuals of this population. • Investigate whether those with Asperger’s syndrome are more likely to suffer from Meares-Irlen syndrome and/or dyslexia. • Assess the integrity of the M-cell pathway in Asperger’s syndrome using perimetric tests available in optometric practice to investigate and also to describe the nature of any defects. • Evaluate eye movement strategies in Asperger’s whilst viewing both text and images. Also to evaluate the most appropriate methodology for investigating eye movements; namely optical digital eye tracking and electrophysiology methodologies. Findings of the investigations include • Eye examinations for individuals with Asperger’s syndrome should contain the same testing methods as for the general population, with special consideration for clear communication. • There is a depression of M-pathway visual field sensitivity in 57% (8/14) of people with Asperger’s syndrome, supporting previous evidence for an M-cell deficit in some individuals. • There is a raised prevalence of dyslexia in Asperger’s syndrome (26% of a sample of 31) but not necessarily of Meares-Irlen syndrome. • Gaze strategies are abnormal in Asperger’s syndrome, for both reading and viewing of images. With increased saccadic movement and decreased viewing of faces in comparison to background detail

Would adults with autism be less likely to bury the survivors? An eye movement study of anomalous text reading

In a single eye movement experiment we investigated the effects of context on the time course of local and global anomaly processing during reading in adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In one condition short paragraph texts contained anomalous target words. Detection of the anomaly was only possible through evaluation of word meaning in relation to the global context of the whole paragraph (Passage Level Anomalies). In another condition the anomaly could be detected via computation of a local thematic violation within a single sentence embedded in the paragraph (Sentence Level Anomalies).For the sentence level anomalies the ASD group, in contrast with the typically developing (TD) group, showed early detection of the anomaly as indexed by regressive eye movements from the critical target word upon fixation. Conversely, for the passage level anomalies, and in contrast with the ASD group, the TD group showed early detection of the anomaly, with increased regressive eye movements once the critical word had been fixated.The reversal of the pattern of regression path data for the two groups, for the sentence and passage level anomalies, is discussed in relation to cognitive accounts of ASD

Accessible texts for autism: an eye-tracking study

Images are widely used in automatic text simplification systems, Picture Exchange Communication Systems (PECS) and human-produced easy-read documents, in order to make text more accessible for people with various types of disabilities, including Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). People with ASD are known to experience difficulties in reading comprehension, as well as to have unusual attention patterns, which makes the development of user-centred tools for this population a challenging task. This paper presents the first study to use eye-tracking technology with ASD participants in order to evaluate text documents. Its aim is two-fold. First, it evaluates the use of images in texts and provides evidence of a significant difference in the attention patterns of participants with and without autism, with the autistic participants focusing on images more than the non-autistic ones. Sets of two types of images, photographs and symbols, are compared to establish which ones are more useful to include in simple documents. Second, the study evaluates human-produced easy-read documents, as a gold standard for accessible documents, on 20 adults with autism. The results provide an understanding of the perceived level of difficulty of easy-read documents according to this population, as well as the preferences of autistic individuals in text presentation. The results are synthesized as set of guidelines for creating accessible text for autism.University of Wolverhampto

Autism detection based on eye movement sequences on the web: a scanpath trend analysis approach

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by ACM in W4A '20: Proceedings of the 17th International Web for All Conference on 20/04/2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371300.3383340 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Autism diagnostic procedure is a subjective, challenging and expensive procedure and relies on behavioral, historical and parental report information. In our previous, we proposed a machine learning classifier to be used as a potential screening tool or used in conjunction with other diagnostic methods, thus aiding established diagnostic methods. The classifier uses eye movements of people on web pages but it only considers non-sequential data. It achieves the best accuracy by combining data from several web pages and it has varying levels of accuracy on different web pages. In this present paper, we investigate whether it is possible to detect autism based on eye-movement sequences and achieve stable accuracy across different web pages to be not dependent on specific web pages. We used Scanpath Trend Analysis (STA) which is designed for identifying a trending path of a group of users on a web page based on their eye movements. We first identify trending paths of people with autism and neurotypical people. To detect whether or not a person has autism, we calculate the similarity of his/her path to the trending paths of people with autism and neurotypical people. If the path is more similar to the trending path of neurotypical people, we classify the person as a neurotypical person. Otherwise, we classify her/him as a person with autism. We systematically evaluate our approach with an eye-tracking dataset of 15 verbal and highly-independent people with autism and 15 neurotypical people on six web pages. Our evaluation shows that the STA approach performs better on individual web pages and provides more stable accuracy across different pages

The Effects of Social Context and Perspective on Language Processing: Evidence from Autism Spectrum Disorder

This thesis aimed to provide new insights into the role of perspective and non-linguistic context in language processing among autistic and typically developing (TD) adults. The mental simulation account and the one-step model state that language is mentally simulated and interpreted in context, suggesting that these processes are activated online while linguistic input is processed. Little is known of whether the same processes are activated in autism. In seven experiments (four were fully pre-registered), I used offline and online measures (e.g. EEG, eye-tracking) to investigate how social factors, such as the perspective, speaker's voice, emotional states of the characters, and topic of conversation influence language comprehension in both lab and real-life settings, in autism and TD adults. Based on the weak central coherence (WCC), and the complex information processing disorder (CIPD) theories, it was expected that autistic adults would struggle to integrate the social context with language, or at least show some subtle delays in the time-course of these anticipation/integration processes. First, I failed to find the same effect as previous findings, showing enhanced processing for personalized language, suggesting that this process is dependent on individual preferences in perspective-taking and task demands. Furthermore, I found that contrary to the WCC, autistic individuals had an intact ability to integrate social context online, while extracting the meaning from language. There were subtle differences in the time-course and strength of these processes between autistic and TD adults under high cognitive load. Findings are in line with CIPD hypothesis, showing that online language processes are disrupted as task demands increase, which consequently affect the quality of their social interactions. Future research should further investigate how these subtle differences impact social communication abilities in everyday life in autism

Characteristics of visual function in Asperger’s syndrome and the autism spectrum

Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and Asperger’s syndrome is part of the spectrum of autism disorders. This thesis aims to: • Review and investigate current theories concerning visual function in individuals with Asperger’s syndrome and high functioning autism spectrum disorder and to translate the findings into clinical practice by developing a specific protocol for the eye examination of individuals of this population. • Investigate whether those with Asperger’s syndrome are more likely to suffer from Meares-Irlen syndrome and/or dyslexia. • Assess the integrity of the M-cell pathway in Asperger’s syndrome using perimetric tests available in optometric practice to investigate and also to describe the nature of any defects. • Evaluate eye movement strategies in Asperger’s whilst viewing both text and images. Also to evaluate the most appropriate methodology for investigating eye movements; namely optical digital eye tracking and electrophysiology methodologies. Findings of the investigations include • Eye examinations for individuals with Asperger’s syndrome should contain the same testing methods as for the general population, with special consideration for clear communication. • There is a depression of M-pathway visual field sensitivity in 57% (8/14) of people with Asperger’s syndrome, supporting previous evidence for an M-cell deficit in some individuals. • There is a raised prevalence of dyslexia in Asperger’s syndrome (26% of a sample of 31) but not necessarily of Meares-Irlen syndrome. • Gaze strategies are abnormal in Asperger’s syndrome, for both reading and viewing of images. With increased saccadic movement and decreased viewing of faces in comparison to background detail.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Classifying referential and non-referential it using gaze

When processing a text, humans and machines must disambiguate between different uses of the pronoun it, including non-referential, nominal anaphoric or clause anaphoric ones. In this paper, we use eye-tracking data to learn how humans perform this disambiguation. We use this knowledge to improve the automatic classification of it. We show that by using gaze data and a POS-tagger we are able to significantly outperform a common baseline and classify between three categories of it with an accuracy comparable to that of linguisticbased approaches. In addition, the discriminatory power of specific gaze features informs the way humans process the pronoun, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored using data from a natural reading task