Digital Comprehensibility Assessment of Simplified Texts among Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

Text simplification refers to the process of increasing the comprehensibility of texts. Automatic text simplification models are most commonly evaluated by experts or crowdworkers instead of the primary target groups of simplified texts, such as persons with intellectual disabilities. We conducted an evaluation study of text comprehensibility including participants with and without intellectual disabilities reading unsimplified, automatically and manually simplified German texts on a tablet computer. We explored four different approaches to measuring comprehensibility: multiple-choice comprehension questions, perceived difficulty ratings, response time, and reading speed. The results revealed significant variations in these measurements, depending on the reader group and whether the text had undergone automatic or manual simplification. For the target group of persons with intellectual disabilities, comprehension questions emerged as the most reliable measure, while analyzing reading speed provided valuable insights into participants' reading behavior.

Using ChatGPT as a CAT tool in Easy Language translation

This study sets out to investigate the feasibility of using ChatGPT to translate citizen-oriented administrative texts into German Easy Language, a simplified, controlled language variety that is adapted to the needs of people with reading impairments. We use ChatGPT to translate selected texts from websites of German public authorities using two strategies, i.e. linguistic and holistic. We analyse the quality of the generated texts based on different criteria, such as correctness, readability, and syntactic complexity. The results indicated that the generated texts are easier than the standard texts, but that they still do not fully meet the established Easy Language standards. Additionally, the content is not always rendered correctly.