Raunak Joneja First-Handin Dr.

Caroline Langensiepen
T2271848 AA&D

First Handin

Advanced Analysis & Design

By Raunak Joneja – T2271848

Supervisor: Dr. Caroline Langensiepen
caroline.langensiepen@ntu.ac.uk

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Raunak Joneja First-Handin Dr. Caroline Langensiepen
T2271848 AA&D

Disclaimer
"This report is the result of my own work. Any contributions to the work by third
parties are stated clearly within the report. Should this statement prove to be untrue I
recognize the right and duty of the Board of Examiners to take appropriate action in line
with the university’s regulations on assessment.
ID No: T2271848

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Introduction
Dyslexia is a learning disorder mainly defined by the difficulty of learning to read
fluently despite normal or above-average intelligence. It is the most common learning
difficulties. Studies show that 70-80% of people with reading difficulties are dyslexic,
and almost 1 in 5 students have reading disabilities (15-20%), with a more or less same
ratio for males and females.

This implies that dyslexic students should not be left out. In the modern age of
technology, a lot can be done to help students fight dyslexia at a young age. The best of
achieving this would be through mobile applications, because mobile applications give
us a wide range of options to modify the content needed to be shown, from increasing
the font size to text-to–speech integration, and also, an interactive app would assist the
kids.

Dyslexics often face many difficulties while reading, they take time to process and
understand information, miss out on works or sentences and at times, due to their
short-term memory deficit, forget what they have just read. They also take a lot of time
processing new words and terminologies. These issues may slow down the vocabulary
growth of the student, where in future he or she may not be able to understand common
vocabulary used in his or her professional life. Therefore, an above-intelligent individual
may be considered a below-average individual in his or her future.

The requirements of the mobile applications would be aimed at solving these issues,
which would assist the dyslexics overcome the issues. This would be achieved by using
the modern age smart-phone, and the numerous features it comes with. By integrating
some of the features, we could assist the kids to read and understand better and
overcome dyslexia.

The features that would mainly be used in the application would be text-to-speech
conversion and speech recognition. Also, followed by a very user-friendly and
interactive UI, with a distinctive colour combination and font size. The app will be a
simple reading game, where sentences or words with their dictionary meaning (for
vocabulary) will be shown in bold text and read out (using text-to-speech) at a slow
pace, the user then has to read it out aloud, the sentence would then be recognized by
the application (using speech recognition APIs) and then matched with the original

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sentence, hence giving points to the user depending on how accurate the sentence was
and the time the user took to read it. The app will be developed for the iOS platform,
using XCode as the IDE. The app will also, have a backend that would enable users to
add their own sentences for their kids to play and learn with.

This app will assist the dyslexic children to learn to read, improve their memory and
vocabulary

Alternate mobile applications

There are a few alternate mobile applications available in the app store, with similar
features but differing approaches, a few of the alternatives are:
 Speak it: Speak it, developed by Future Apps Inc. is a simple text-to-speech app
priced at $1.99. it is a simple text-to speech app that reads out your emails, text
messages and even external PDF documents. This app is not solely dedicated to
the disability community but it is also not gone un-noticed that it can be highly
useful for people with reading disabilities.
Features:
 Different voices available with American and British English
 Font of text can be altered
 Spoken text can be saved as audio files and emailed
 Can read emails, text messages and even external documents
 Easy-to-use UI
 Can be used even while on a phone call

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T2271848 AA&D

 Flashcards for iPad: Flashcards, developed by INKids, is an educational game,

priced at $1.99 on the apple app store. The app assists young kids and kids with
Learning Disabilities to study words, learn their spelling and improve their
vocabulary. It has a collection of learning tools and games for pre-schoolers and
people with LD.
Features:
 Options of multiple languages
 Record own sound file for a certain word
 Multiple learning games
 Easy-to-use and interactive UI
 Colourful characters to attract kids
 Assists users learning to recognize words, good help for someone
with a reading disability like dyslexia

 Prizmo: Prizmo, developed by Craceed SPRL is a camera based text recognition

app, priced at $9.99 at the apple app store. It uses the mobile camera to scan and

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recognize text, users can scan entire documents and export it to PDF format, and
also read it aloud, using text-to-speech conversion. This makes the app useful for
people with reading disabilities since it is able to scan physical documents and
then have it read aloud to the user.
Features
 Highly accurate OCR technology in 40+ languages
 Text-to-speech available
 Export options to PDF or vCard for visiting cards
 Text translation (using Microsoft translation web services)
 Internet connectivity not required (unless wanting to connect to
social-media, like Facebook and Twitter)

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Requirements
 Functional Requirements
There will be two ends of the app, the game, and an admin panel, where the
admin will be able to set up a classroom and add users, add more sentences
and monitor the student’s performance.
The Game:
 The first screen should show a screen for the user to enter the
classroom id and his or her username.
 The first screen after the user logs in should display a welcome
message with the main menu
 The main menu should have the options of playing the game,
viewing the high-score, sharing their high-score on Facebook and a
settings page
 The game must show a sentence which should be read out using a
text-to-speech API
 The game must start a timer once the sentence is finished being
read.
 The game must access the phone’s microphone to listen to the
user’s input and match it to the original sentence
 The game must show a set of 5 questions to the user before
showing the score
 The game must then give points to the user depending on how
accurate the sentence was, and the time taken to finish it
 The game must show a message to the user, depicting his or her
performance (the message should be very positive) with an option
of try again or go to the next set.
 The game should have a set of 5 pre-set easy sentences
 The game must then parse the sentences sent from the server, by
the admin and add it as the second set of sentences, which will be
used after the first set is answered.
 The game should then display the scores of the user in a graphical
format, showing the time taken to answer each set of questions
and the percentage of accuracy
 The game must then send all the data to the server, with the
classroom and username of the user, this should be done using
REST web-services with XML schema
 The high score page of the game must show the highest score,
depicting the time and accuracy of the sentences.
 The high score page should also have a history button, which
shows the scores of the user in a graphical format
 The share button should connect to Facebook to share the highest
score to the user’s Facebook account.

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The Admin Panel:

 The admin panel should show a screen asking the supervisor to register or
login
 The admin panel should show the admin menu once the supervisor registers
or logs in
 The admin menu should have the options of adding a classroom, adding a
student to a classroom, adding a set of sentences, viewing individual and
cumulative scores
 The admin panel should only allow addition of a 5-set sentence, since the
game requires 5 sentences per set, with a drop-down box for the difficulty (i.e.
either easy, medium or hard)
 The admin or supervisor can also add, dictionary definitions of a particular
word, for that there should be a checkbox, to tag it as a sentence or
vocabulary. (Though the output on the game screen would be the same).
 The admin panel should show cumulative scores in a graphical format, with
an editable timeline and with a search bar to search for a specific student or
students that would hide the rest except the scores of the desired student(s).
 The admin panel should also have an option to edit or delete information for
each of the pages, the classroom, user, set of sentences and score pages.
 The system should send a feedback email, to the supervisor of the classroom,
indicating any changes in a specific student or the entire classroom
performance, weather it maybe declining or rising.

NOTE: These requirements are based on the brief given about the app, the research of
the alternative applications, the research of the disorder and the questionnaire given to
a head teacher of a primary school.

 Non-Functional Requirements:
Like the functional requirements, there will be two parts to the non-
functional requirements, one for the game itself which will run on the
iPhone and the admin panel which will be a website
The Game
 The game should be compatible to run smoothly with the iPhone
 The game should run on all iPhones, and compatible with all the 4
separate screen sizes, the iPhone 4, 5, 6 and 6-plus
 The game will be played in the landscape mode
 The size of the game should not be more than 12mb
 The game should be smooth flowing

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 The game should be played using the touch-screen interface

 The game should be able to access the internet and communicate
the server
 The game should be able to access the device’s speakers and
microphone

Project Scope
 In-Scope:
The game will have 5 pre-set questions, and supervisors will have the
option to add sets of questions that can be used by the user. The
supervisor would also be able to add classrooms, and add students to the
classroom. The game will be able to communicate with the server with
XML and REST web-services. The game will use APIs to access the
microphone and speakers, and APIs for using text-to-speech and voice
recognition. The app will also be able to give basic feedback and a
graphical view of the history of scores of a user and the option of
cumulative scores to the supervisor
 Out-of-Scope:
The game will not have an option of multiple language settings, and will
not have a separate section for vocabulary sentences; it will be shown as
the same type. Though an option will be given at the backend of the app to
tag a sentence as a vocabulary sentence or otherwise, which would enable
us to alter this in a future update.

Suggested System-Architecture
The native mobile application architecture should be used, that would be to develop the
application in Objective-C using the XCode IDE. The main advantages for this would be
that:
 It gives access to all the APIs to use the microphone and speaker more
conveniently
 The app performance is generally better on native apps, due to the control of
memory usage
 With physical memory storage there is lesser usage of the Internet, the images
and the static data doesn’t require to be downloaded, the only communication
with the Internet is with the server to request and parse data to the system.
 Since the game is to be developed only for the iOS platform it is pointless to build
a cross-platform application, natives are always suggested while developing a
single-platform app.

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T2271848 AA&D

References
 PublicMed Health (04/01/2013). Development Reading Disorder. Link:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0002379/
 International Dyslexia Association Overcoming Dyslexia, Sally Shivwits, M.D.
 Basic Facts about Dyslexia and Other Reading Problems, Luisa Cook Moats, Karen
E. Dakin, 2008, The International Dyslexia Association.
 Learning Inside Out (2012) Dyslexia Statistics. Link:
http://www.learning-inside-out.com/dyslexia-statistics.html
 Staff Intranet (2010) Dyslexic Student, Reading Difficulties. Link:
http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/sas/Student%20Wellbeing/disability/support_info
_staff/learning_difficulties/Pages/dyslexic_student_reading_difficulties.aspx
 Teachers with apps, (17/09/2012), 50 Best apps for Reading Disabilities. Link:
http://teacherswithapps.com/50-best-ipad-apps-for-reading-disabilities/

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