Math-to-speech Effectiveness and Appreciation for People with Developmental Learning Disorders

Accessing written math content can be difficult for students with Developmental Learning Disorders. Through a user study with 19 representative participants, we investigate how text-to-speech access compares to reading for these students in terms of math syntax memorability, as well as the perceived accessibility, ease of access, and usefulness. Results show that text-to-speech is regarded as significantly easier and more useful for accessing math content, compared to reading access. The perceived accessibility of math content is also higher for text-to-speech access, but actual improvement could not be verified as much of the content was correctly memorized in both conditions. However, some of the considered content was consistently better memorized through text-to-speech, indicating promising future applications of this technology.