The purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between the reading level of parents of students in special education and the readability level of special education documents/forms. A related purpose was to determine whether a difference between reading level and the readability of documents/forms was related to parental involvement. The sample consisted of 30 parents of students in special education who were enrolled at Mosheim Elementary School in 2002. Parents were tested using the Woodcock-Johnson Psycho-Educational Battery: Part Two-Tests of Achievement, developed by Richard W. Woodcock and M. Bonner Johnson. Subtest 13, 14, and 15 were administered to parents. Subtest 13 is a Letter-Word Identification subtest, Subtest 14 is a Word Attack subtest, and Subtest 15 is a comprehension subtest. Parents were asked to complete a short survey that elicited information on education level, actual years of school completed, annual household income, work schedule, and household members. Parents were also asked five questions concerning their knowledge of their childÆs IEP. At the conclusion of the session, parents were interviewed concerning their feelings about attending IEP Team Meetings at the school. The findings from this study showed the average reading level of parents was at the 9.0 grade level. Special education documents/forms had readability levels that ranged from 9.9 to 12.0 grade levels. These scores showed parents were generally reading three grade levels lower than the reading level required to read the special education documents/forms. Parents also demonstrated a limited understanding of their childrenÆs IEP. Only 13.3% answered all five questions correctly and 26.7% answered four questions correctly. Sixty percent of the parents could only answer one, two, or three questions correctly. The study also showed that 93.3% of the parents surveyed attended their childÆs IEP Team Meeting at the school during the year. Only two of the 30 parents in the sample did not attend their childÆs IEP Team Meeting. The results highlight the difficulty that many parents have in reading the various forms used in special education, including the Individual Education Program for their child/children.

Purpose: An Internet-based tinnitus intervention for use in the United States could improve the provision of tinnitus-related services. Although clinical trials of such interventions were completed in Europe, the United Kingdom, and Australia, their suitability for adults with tinnitus in the United States is yet to be established. The aim of this study was to improve the cultural and linguistic suitability, and lower the readability level, of an existing program for tinnitus to ensure its suitability for U.S. English- and Spanish-speaking populations. Method: Guidelines for adaptation were followed and involved four phases: (a) cultural adaptations, as interventions targeted at specific cultures have been shown to improve outcomes; (b) creating Spanish materials to improve access of the materials to the large Spanish-speaking population in the United States; (c) professional review of the materials for acceptability as an intervention tool for a U.S. population; and (d) literacy-level adjustments to make the content accessible to those with lower levels of health literacy skills. Results: Cultural adaptations were made by using word substitutions, changing examples, and modifying the spelling of certain words. The materials were then translated into Spanish and cross-checked. Professional review ensured suitability of the chapters. Literacy-level adjustments ensured all chapters were within the guidelines for readability grade levels below the sixth-grade level. Conclusions: The previously developed tinnitus materials were revised to adhere to best practice guidelines and ensure cultural suitability for adults with tinnitus in the United States. As it is also available in Spanish, members of the large Hispanic community also have access to the intervention in their first language. Further studies should determine whether these changes improve patients' self-efficacy, engagement, and motivation to complete the intervention.

I programvarans livscykel spenderas mycket tid i det sista steget, underhållsfasen. I detta stadie är mjukvaran färdigutvecklad och behöver kontinuerligt underhåll för att säkerställa programvarans ständiga funktionalitet och effektivitet [25]. Det är därför viktigt att programvaran är så läsbar som möjligt då nya programmerare oftast tillkommer till projekten och för att snabbt kunna felsöka koden. Procedurer (metoderi Java) lärs ut som ett sätt att hålla koden strukturerad och lättläst. Läsbarhet av kod har blivit mer och mer studerat under de senaste åren och med hjälp av eye-tracking har läsbarhet av kod kunnat studerats på ett konkret sätt. I denna rapport har procedurers inverkan på läsbarhet av kod undersökts vilket har gjorts genom att undersöka tio testpersoners ögonrörelser vid tolkning av ett antal problem i Java, där problemen skilt sig till användandet av procedurer eller ej. Metodiken som valts har varit ett kontrollerat experiment där de tilldelade problemen involverat tolkning av kod samtidigt som deltagarnas ögonrörelser studerats och presenteras som bilder och data i form av diagram över punkter där blicken fixerats i koden. Resultaten visar attnybörjare generellt sett tar längre tid på sig att läsa procedurer jämfört med monolitisk kod (sekventiell kod, motsatsen till proceduruppdelad kod), medan erfarna programmerare inte skilde sig i lika hög gradeller var till och med snabbare på att lösa de procedurellt uppdelade kodsegmenten. Man kan även tyda att erfarna programmerare har ett annat sätt att läsa kod jämfört med nybörjare vilket kan vara intressant att studera ytterligare. Slutsatsen för experimentet är att kontrollflödesabstraktioner i form av procedurer gör det lättare för programmerare att läsa kod men det krävs tid och vana för att ta del av de gynnsamma effekterna utav dem. / In the software life cycle, a great amount of time is spent on the final stage, the maintenance phase. At this stage, the software is fully developed and needs continuous maintenance to ensure constant functionality and efficiency of the software [25]. It is therefore important for the software to be as readable as possible since other programmers might start working on the software. It is also important to keep the code readable to quickly troubleshoot the code. Procedures are taught as a way to keep the code structured and easy to read among other abstractions. In recent years, the study of code readability has gained an increasing popularity and with the help of eye-tracking it has allowed for the study of readability in a more concrete way. In this report, the impact of procedures on code readability has been investigated by conducting a controlled experiment, which has been done by examining the eye movements of ten test subjects who had been tasked with interpreting a number of problems in Java, where the problems ranged from the use of procedures or not (being plain monolithic code blocks). The assigned problems involve the interpretation of code while their eye movements are recorded and presented as images and as data in a spreadsheet. The results show that beginners generally take longer to read methods compared to sequential code, while experienced programmers did not differ as much- or were even faster to resolve the procedural code segments. It can also be said that experienced programmers have a different way of reading code compared to beginners which may be interesting to study further. The conclusion is that control flow abstractions in the form of procedures make it easier for programmers to read code, but it takes time and experience to take advantage of their beneficial effects.

This thesis is a benchmark performed on three commercial Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engines. The purpose of this benchmark is to characterize the performance of the OCR engines with emphasis on the correlation of errors between each engine. The benchmarks are performed for the evaluation of the effect of a multi-OCR system employing a voting scheme to increase overall recognition accuracy. This is desirable since currently OCR systems are still unable to recognize characters with 100% accuracy. The existing error rates of OCR engines pose a major problem for applications where a single error can possibly effect significant outcomes, such as in legal applications. The results obtained from this benchmark are the primary determining factor in the decision of implementing a voting scheme. The experiment performed displayed a very high accuracy rate for each of these commercial OCR engines. The average accuracy rate found for each engine was near 99.5% based on a less than 6,000 word document. While these error rates are very low, the goal is 100% accuracy in legal applications. Based on the work in this thesis, it has been determined that a simple voting scheme will help to improve the accuracy rate.

The transition in robotics from tools to teammates has begun. However, the benefit autonomous robots provide will be diminished if human teammates misinterpret robot behaviors. Applying mental model theory as the organizing framework for human understanding of robots, the current empirical study examined the influence of task-role mental models of robots on the interpretation of robot motion behaviors, and the resulting impact on subjective ratings of robots. Observers (N = 120) were exposed to robot behaviors that were either congruent or incongruent with their task-role mental model, by experimental manipulation of preparatory robot task-role information to influence mental models (i.e., security guard, groundskeeper, or no information), the robot's actual task-role behaviors (i.e., security guard or groundskeeper), and the order in which these robot behaviors were presented. The results of the research supported the hypothesis that observers with congruent mental models were significantly more accurate in interpreting the motion behaviors of the robot than observers without a specific mental model. Additionally, an incongruent mental model, under certain circumstances, significantly hindered an observer's interpretation accuracy, resulting in subjective sureness of inaccurate interpretations. The strength of the effects that mental models had on the interpretation and assessment of robot behaviors was thought to have been moderated by the ease with which a particular mental model could reasonably explain the robot's behavior, termed mental model applicability. Finally, positive associations were found between differences in observers' interpretation accuracy and differences in subjective ratings of robot intelligence, safety, and trustworthiness. The current research offers implications for the relationships between mental model components, as well as implications for designing robot behaviors to appear more transparent, or opaque, to humans.

Adaptive Equipment at Home is an educational health-literate patient resource designed for older adults with limited health literacy, with a focus on improving the understanding of adaptive equipment in an accessible way. Many patient resources are not health literate, leading to decreased functional independence, quality of life, and safety, especially in the older adult population. Adaptive Equipment at Home follows health literacy guidelines founded upon evidence-based research while applying the core principles from andragogy theory and the rehabilitative frame of reference. The ultimate goal of Adaptive Equipment at Home is to increase functional independence in older adults while improving the policies regarding health literacy in patient resources in healthcare facilities.

Due to the surge in the development of software, people in the software industry have a need for higher coding quality in different programming languages. A “code with good quality” can be defined as code that is written in a way that follows the rules or, in other words, conventions for, i.e., comments, proper indentation, clear notations, simplicity, naming, etc. There are coding style guidelines extracted from Java and Oracle code conventions to have readable, maintainable source code; however, the current studies do not answer the question of to what extent the open-source systems follow these guidelines. Finding the violations of conventions at the early stages of software development is essential because the changes are costly and impossible in the later stages. As a result, adhering to coding conventions will facilitate code readability and maintainability. Thus, this study intends to analyze the results from several code quality tools, make a comparison among them and, based on the outcomes, develop a new tool that covers the probable missing conventions in the studied code-checking tools.

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Mediehusen fokuserar nästintill uteslutande på dagstidningar online, då den trycktadagstidningen av olika anledningar saknar positiva framtidsutsikter (Svenska mediehus2014/15 2015). I dagens medieklimat finns det större möjligheter att publicerajournalistik och kunna tjäna pengar på det online och när det kommer till formgivningenfinns det många lika men också olika förutsättningar, i jämförelse med dentryckta dagstidningen. En förutsättning oavsett plattform är formgivningens anpassningefter annonser och affärsmodeller, snarare än läsare och journalistik (6.3.1:5 och6.3.3:5) . En skillnad när det gäller förutsättningar är att det i tryckta medier finns enfrihet i layouten, att skapa både ett horisontellt såväl som vertikalt flöde, medan detonline är standard att till exempel enbart använda sig av en (potentiellt) oändlig spalt.2Det bör alltså läggas stor vikt vid hur man sätter brödtexten i den här enda spalten ochaspekter som typsnitt, whitespace och bildsättning spelar in. Den här uppsatsen fokuserapå en fjärde och lika viktig aspekt: teckengrad.En standard finns sedan länge för den tryckta dagstidningen, men vi ser fortfarandeolika förhållningssätt för dagstidningar på Internet. Annonsanpassade affärsmodellertillsammans med äldre skärmars lågupplösning, har skapat en layout där allawebbtidningens element upplevs som små. Fler och fler indicier pekar nu på att brödtextenförväntas öka i storlek. Följer man den modell som designbyrån InformationArchitects arbetat fram kan man enkelt räkna ut vilken teckengrad en brödtext bör ha,på respektive digital skärm, för att denna text skall motsvara upplevelsen av en tryckttext (Information Architects 2006). Sätter man en brödtext på webben i proportion tillen brödtext i en bok, med önskad motsvarande läsupplevelse, ökar den digitala teckengraden, bland annat eftersom vi läser den på längre avstånd än en tryckt bok. Applicerar man teorier om typografi och läsbarhet, från bland andra typografer somHallberg (1992) och Hellmark (2005), samt designers som Peetre (6.3.1), Häggström(6.3.2) och Sigfridsson (6.3.3) framträder en förvisso inte helt tydlig bild, men ändå en där teckengraden i webbdagstidningar beräknas öka. Vare sig den gör det eller inte,går att konstateras att konsensus lär råda över tid: Precis som den tryckta dagstidningensbrödtext har en standard, växer ur relationen mellan producent och användare, enstandard fram även för design av text på Internet. Vi ser idag extremer åt alla håll, textkan se ur precis hur som helst. Men dessa extremer skapar ändå en medelkurva, enuniversell design, som tar brödtextens utveckling framåt. För att fånga den här kollektivtskapade utvecklingen, gynnas uppsatsen av att se problemområdet ur tre aspekter.Genom en kvantitativ studie av alla (125) svenska dagstidningar på Internet skapadesett forskningsintroducerande material, som ger en övergripande bild av teckengradeni brödtext i dagstidningar på Internet. För att närma sig frågeställningen,När det kommer till teckengrad, radavstånd och spaltbredd, hur ser brödtexten ut isamtliga svenska dagstidningar på Internet? Vilka faktorer, med fokus på teckengrad,kan underlätta läsbarheten?, stödjs den kvantitativa undersökningen med professionsintervjuer med representanter från mediebranschen, samt en webbenkät som ger indicier av läsvanor och läsupplevelse bland dagstidningsläsare. Med hjälp av den insamladedatan söker därmed denna uppsats besvara frågor kring hur teckengraden ser ut idag, men också om det är ett problem och i så fall hur webbdesignen på den här punktenbör utvecklas, mot det slutgiltiga syftet att förändra och förbättra den digitaladagstidningen som produkt.Sverige har en av världens högsta andel tidningsläsare per capita (World presstrends 2014) och ligger ofta i framkant när det kommer till webbdesign för dagstidningar.Dagstidningen på Internet är nu i ett vägskäl och en överblick över hur det serut i dag bör vara av största intresse. / Media company put almost all of their financials on online products and the printednewspaper is almost gone thanks to rationalized thinking (Svenska mediehus 2014/152015). In todays media climate there is more opportunities in online journalism andwhen it comes to design, you will find a lot of conditions that are both similar and differentfrom printed journalism. One of the similarities is the adaption to ads, ratherthan to readers and to journalism (6.3.1:5; 6.3.3:5).One of the differences is the layout and when it comes to print, your can lay the bodytext in two or many columns, but the standard online is to lay it in one. This creates,rather than a horizontal, a strictly vertical reading and a (potentially) infinite column.3Although the exceptions exist, focus in online journalism is on the one column andaspects as font, whitespace and image take part. This essay will focus though on afourth and as important aspect: type size.Since long there is a standard for printed newspaper, while online there is anotherset of approaches. Ads and old times low-resolution screens gave birth to a web designwhere design elements where perceived as small. More and more evidence showsthat body text will get larger. If you follow the model set by Information Architectsyou can easily calculate which font size to use online, if you want it to equal the experienceof reading a printed body text (Information Architects 2006). If you follow thismodel to get the digital text match the printed, the font size will naturally get bigger,among other things, because we read it from a bigger distance. If you apply theoriesof typography and readability from among others typographers as Hallberg (1992)and Hellmark (2005), and designers as Peetre (6.3.1), Häggström (6.3.2) and Sigfridsson(6.3.3), a depiction, if not wholly solid but still, will appear that will indicate anincrease in font size.With a quantitative study of all (125) Swedish newspapers on the Internet, a researchintroductory material takes shape, which gives an overview on the state of typesize in body text in newspapers on the Internet. To lead up to the research problem,When it comes to type size, line spacing and column width, how is the body text designed in Swedish newspapers on the Internet? What are the aspects, focusing on typesize, that facilitates readability?, the quantitative study is supported by interviewswith representatives from the industry and a web survey which gives circumstantial ofreading habits and reading experience among readers of newspapers. With this data,this essay strive to answer questions about how the type size appears today but also ifthere is a problem and how, on this particular aspect, web design should develop.Sweden is among the best in the world when it comes to readers of newspapersper capita (World press trends 2014). Right now web design in newspapers is at crossroads and an overview of the situation should be of great interest.

The readability of source code is essential for software maintenance. Since maintenance is an ongoing process, which is estimated to be 70 percent of the software development life cycle's total costs, it cannot be deprioritized. The readability of source code is likely to affect the program comprehension, which may help or create problems in the maintenance of the software. How different code features and functions affect the readability of source code have previously been investigated, and readability metrics have been developed. The project was initiated because of the lack of research on how programming knowledge and statically compared to dynamically typed programming languages affect the readability of the source code. A survey was conducted and included 21 computer science students with various programming knowledge, each rating eight code snippets, making it in total 168 ratings. The results showed that the type of programming language could improve the readability of source code. The results also showed that programming knowledge does not have a correlation with the ability to read source code.