At Japanese Society for Rehabilitation of People with Disabilities (JSRPD), we have been collaborating with volunteer groups and others since FY 2008 to produce and supply multimedia digital textbooks “DAISY” for children and students in compulsory education who have difficulty reading due to developmental disabilities or other causes.

According to the results of a survey carried out by MEXT in December 2012, which looked at children and students enrolled in regular classes who might have developmental disabilities requiring extra support, 2.4%, or around 240,000 children and students have difficulty reading or writing and are in need of support.

Reading difficulties are said to include not only visual problems, in which the characters blur, sway, or appear reversed or hazy, but also difficulty in recognizing that characters are “symbols” which represent “sounds”, or slowness in remembering names.

When reading paper-based textbooks, such children have to try their hardest simply to read, and often do not have the capacity to go beyond this to understand the content. With DAISY, multimedia digital textbooks, textual data is highlighted and read aloud, so children can hear it and understand which part they are reading. The background colour, font size, and speed at which the spoken data is played can all be changed, allowing customisation according to individual needs. By reducing the reading burden, children are able to use their innate abilities for learning goals.

In FY 2019, the number of users of DAISY reached around 12,000, but the adoption rate was limited, at just 5%. In addition, the wide divergence in adoption rates between different prefectures remains an issue. Moreover, simply providing textbooks is not enough to enable children to learn language, cultivate sensitivity, increase their powers of expression, and develop rich creativity. The digitization of the supplementary texts recommended in the textbooks, which support reading and writing activities, has become a pressing issue. Here at JSRPD, we are playing our small part in supporting this. (N)