OSM for the dyslexic presentation at 10th GEO European Projects Workshop 2016

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What is the match between this popular drink and the animal? And way we are putting those things into the GIS field? Because the word “beer” and the word “deer” sounds similar and this becomes a problem for people with a reading disorder. That is our story because we tryed to mitigate those kind of problems while using Open Street Map and for now on any GIS software

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Dyslexia is the most widespread specific learning difference in Europe We have direct experience with dyslexics and we brought together solutions that worked and continue to work in our every day activities:

• uppercase letters and specific fonts to increase readability
• Spacing in page is important, dyslexics read single words in isolation
• and specific software that helps dyslexics the hear the correct sound of the words

3

First we removed the ninety percent of geographical information keeping only some layers: restaurants, roads, museums, schools, supermarket, and few others. and after that we started adding specific functionalities:

• location history, to help the user to recognize the path followed to reach the location
• eagle eye in a tap and quick return exaclty to the same position
• every 5 seconds we run automatically an identify to prevent the user to feel lost
• the identification can be done on any point of the map, regardeless of the layer
• and last but not the least the text2speech capability in case of panic

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The innovation in our project is in 3 places:

• For the first time a GIS application has been developed specifically for a dyslexic user for now we have few feedback (from our testers only) but they found our application far more usable than the general purpose ones.
• From the technology point of view we implemented the identification process totally client side. We invented and make use of this brand new technology embedding feature ids into the tiles where the feature is.
• And a consequence of this technology is that every static web server can host a complete GIS application. No need to have Geoserver, mapserver, databases to Host. You need them to produce the data and the tiles.

5

As OSM for the dyslexic team now we know how to map for a dyslexic user and we can say that we have experience into the field.

• uppercase letters
• use of specific fonts
• straight words surrounded by enough empty space to prevent crowding
• help the user with specific functionalities

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Thanks again from all the OSM for the dyslexic team!

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