Leon, J.A.

Background. Over the last several decades, the world has been made more accessible for people with disabilities. However, many of these achievements have primarily focused on physical limitations, and it is also important that the environment be made easy to understand for those people who may be at risk of social exclusion. Reading competence is one of the fundamental functional skills people need to access communication and culture. The facilitation of this adaptation is called cognitive accessibility. Cognitive accessibility encompasses everything related to how people understand the meaning of their environment, and especially written documents.

Objective.The main objective of this study was to establish a scale of evaluation of reading competence for adults with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) compared to university students (as a control group). Thus, we sought to  establish different levels of reading competence relative to the difficulty of various texts (A, B, C), in accordance with the criteria established in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR).

Design. 450 adults with IDD and 200 undergraduate university students took part in this study. They read and were scored on three texts of different lexical and semantic complexity.

Results. The results in three different studies showed that adults with intellectual and developmental disability (AIDD) improve their performance in reading comprehension when additional time and support are made available.

Conclusion. If a greater amount of time is made available, the performance of a significant part of the AIDD population improves considerably, in some cases approaching the level of performance of university students. These results raise new lines of research on how to give people with IDD access to more comprehensible and accessible reading material.