Easy Reading.

Shortlist at El Sol Festival.

Accesible Inteligence

The first AI Tool that enables people with intellectual disabilities to access the literature of an entire country

Challenge

According to the world tourism organization, the numbers of travellers are almost back to normal following the outbreak of Covid-19. But 40 million people with intellectual disabilities across the globe are still shut out. How could Visit Portugal make its cities, stories, traditions and authors accessible to all?

Approach

In 2020, in the midst of lockdown and with the country's borders closed due to the pandemic, Visit Portugal launched Read Portugal, a campaign where people could "continue to visit" the Portuguese country by reading its literary classics. It was an initiative to open the country to the world, but how could we take it further to make Portugal truly open to all?

Solution

We created an articifical intellience tool capable of combining text processing with the creation of images to convert any novel into an "easy-to-read" book. This AI tool has been trained following the European standards for making information Easy-to-Read and makes Portuguese literature accessible to people with intellectual disabilities.

It reads and synthesizes the original text, simplifying and replacing complex words and rephrasing content into shorter sentences. Additionally, it automatically generates illustrations in order to provide context, while formatting the information following design rules that enhance readability.

Then an expert in Easy-to-Read validates the content. By digitizing much of the work that has been done manually the past, making it highly time-consuming and costly, "translating" text to make it accessible can be done at speed and scale. Now, with Easy Reading, millions of books, have the potential to be read by everyone.