Including people in the automatic text adaptation process: empirical findings from students with intellectual disability

Modern automatic text adaptation often fails to meet the specific needs of targeted readers. The TextAD project aimed to address this gap by creating tailored texts for students with intellectual disability (ID), focusing on their unique challenges. This exploratory study presents findings from three rounds of testing automatic adaptations at lexical, syntactic, and discourse levels in expository texts. Reading comprehension, self-reported ratings of comprehension, interest, and perceived difficulty, along with metacognitive insights were assessed with 27 students with ID, refining adaptations based on each iteration’s results. While comprehension gains for the adapted versions were not significant overall, promising outcomes appeared with lexical and syntactic adaptations in the later rounds of testing, although group heterogeneity influenced results. Despite reporting high comprehension, students noted persistent difficulty understanding many expository concepts. Alongside evaluating the effects of text adaptations on comprehension and perceived understanding, this paper offers insights into assessment approaches for developing automatic adaptations tailored to this audience. Automatic lexical and syntactic text adaptations can help improve reading comprehension for students with intellectual disabilities (ID), but significant group heterogeneity affects outcomes.It was unclear if automatic discourse-level adaptations improved the student’s unsupervised reading, such adaptations may require explicit instruction.Students with ID report considerable difficulty understanding concepts in expository texts, suggesting that key vocabulary should be discussed or introduced closely alongside the reading task. Definitions provided in or outside the text did not aid student understanding. Automatic lexical and syntactic text adaptations can help improve reading comprehension for students with intellectual disabilities (ID), but significant group heterogeneity affects outcomes. It was unclear if automatic discourse-level adaptations improved the student’s unsupervised reading, such adaptations may require explicit instruction. Students with ID report considerable difficulty understanding concepts in expository texts, suggesting that key vocabulary should be discussed or introduced closely alongside the reading task. Definitions provided in or outside the text did not aid student understanding.