Graphical Schemes May Improve Readability but Not Understandability for People with Dyslexia

Generally, people with dyslexia are poor readers but strong visual thinkers. The use of graphical schemes for helping text comprehension is recommended in education manuals. This study explores the relation between text readability and the visual conceptual schemes which aim to make the text more clear for these specific target readers. Our results are based on a user study for Spanish native speakers through a group of twenty three dyslexic users and a control group of similar size. The data collected from our study combines qualitative data from questionnaires and quantitative data from tests carried out using eye tracking. The findings suggest that graphical schemes may help to improve readability for dyslexics but are, unexpectedly, counterproductive for understandability.