Accessible Classics: Digital Adaptations for People with Reading Difficulties

“Accessible Classics” is a student collaborative project that aims at making classic literary and educational texts accessible to people with reading difficulties. The project relies on the premise that access to reading is a universal right and that inclusive education can erode the borders that segregate communities and individuals.

The project launched with bilingual adaptations of Spanish literary texts (Don Quixote --an abridged version--, The Lay of the Cid, and Lazarillo de Tormes), which follow both the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) guidelines and the Inclusion Europe Standards. The multimodal format of the project, which combines images, texts, audio, and video, acknowledges the plurality of literacies and its vital role in promoting inclusiveness. Besides employing traditional methods such as “close reading”, students work on the adaptations with the aid of computational text analysis, data visualization, and stylometry.

Faculty Project Leader

María Ángeles Fernández Cifuentes is an associate professor of Spanish at UNF. Her research focuses on modern adaptations of early modern Spanish texts and the role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education, particularly in the teaching of literature.