While reading is arguably a student’s most important skill, the technology of reading is relatively unchanged. Can the power of computing improve a student’s reading comprehension? We will discuss what has been learned about typography in the last 500 years, about reading psychology in the last 100 years, and what technology can be invented right now.
Mike Bennett and Kevin Larson are teammates on Microsoft’s Advanced Reading Technologies team. For over 25 years the team has been researching how to make on-screen reading better. Mike is a vision scientist, who did a postdoc in Stanford University, was a researcher in MIT’s Media Lab Europe, and holds a PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland. Kevin is a reading psychologist with a PhD from the University of Texas; he is well-known in the field of typography for bridging the knowledge gap between design and the science of reading.