Supporting deaf children's reading skills: the many challenges of text simplification

Deaf children have great difficulties in reading comprehension. In our contribution, we illustrate how we have collected, simplified and presented some stories in order to render them suitable for young Italian deaf readers both from a linguistic and a formal point of view. The aim is to stimulate their pleasure of reading. The experimental data suggest that the approach is effective and that enriching the stories with static and/or animated drawings significantly improves text readability. However, they also clearly point out that textual simplification alone is not enough to meet the needs of the target group and that the story structure itself and its presentation have to be carefully planned.