Elhuyar's Language and Technology unit has developed the Irakurle Digitala app to help students who have difficulty reading dyslexia or other readings in schools.

In education, dyslexia is a known problem. According to some studies, at least one in 10 people have difficulty reading, although they do not diagnose everyone. In the teaching-learning process, this can be a serious drawback and technology can help students with dyslexia or other reading difficulties.

For this, text to speech conversion systems are ideal allies that allow us to listen instead of reading the text we have on the computer screen.

To date, however, there was no device created specifically for texts in Basque, and voice synthesizers in Spanish were used for reading texts in Basque. But the pronouncements are not the same in both languages, and in Basque we have sounds that do not have in Spanish, such as TX, TS and TZ. Therefore, when reading texts in Basque with synthesizer in Spanish there are problems of understanding that, far from being an auxiliary system, hinder the learning process.

They realized this in the Berritzegune Nagusia of the Department of Education of the Basque Government and went to Elhuyar to offer a solution to the educational centers of the Basque Autonomous Community. Elhuyar's language technologies area has extensive experience in tools and services based on language and voice technologies. Among other things, it develops solutions based on vocal synthesis in Basque (and for other languages) developed by the Aholkularitza group of the UPV. To respond to this need of the Berritzegune Nagusia, Elhuyar created the Digital Reader.

The Digital Reader, in fact, are two tools: A plugin or extension for the Firefox web browser and the LibreOffice/OpenOffice office office office software. With the installation of these extensions, in the two mentioned programs a new bar appears in which, together with the “play” button, two boxes select the language and speed. Available languages include Basque, Spanish and English.

By pressing this “play” button with an open website or document, the system will start reading the document in the language and at the chosen speed, sentences by sentence and the phrase being read is highlighted on the screen. At any time we can stop reading and say that we follow the place we want in the text.

The solution developed serves to read documents in the most common formats: The plugin for Firefox is for websites and PDFs and the plugin for LibreOffice allows you to read documents written with word processor with extension .odt, .doc or .docx. In addition, both software works on any PC operating system, so the Digital Reader works on both Linux, Windows and Mac.

If you want to try it, you will find it on the Berritzegune Nagusia website, downloadable for free.