UMaine News

Professors Receive $100,000 Grant to Translate, Simplify Anti-Smoking Website Text

Contact: Stephen Gilson, (207) 581-2409; George Manlove, (207) 581-3756

ORONO — Imagine software that could simplify complicated language on healthcare or government websites. Two University of Maine faculty members, collaborating with an Orono software development company and the Literacy Volunteers of Bangor, have received a $100,000 research grant to do just that on the state’s anti-smoking website.

Elizabeth DePoy and Stephen Gilson, professors of Interdisciplinary Disability Studies, Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies at the UMaine, have received a $100,000 grant from the American Legacy Foundation to develop software to translate text on the Tobacco Free Maine website to a simplified version that’s understandable for people with limited English language reading or comprehension skills.

“This is looking beyond 508 accessibility,” says principal investigator Gilson, referring to Section 508 requirements mandating state and federal websites to include accessibility features for computer users with hearing and visual impairments.

The project will create software and an Internet portal to automatically translate text from the Tobacco Free Maine website to levels suitable to individual users, says DePoy. Literacy levels would be determined by a user literacy test and translations would be achieved through an electronic thesaurus that swaps complex words for simpler nouns and verbs.

Trefoil Corporation of Orono will develop the software under the one-year initiative.

The project includes development, evaluation and dissemination of a Web portal that will translate existing smoking cessation, control and prevention websites into low-literacy and accessible formats.

Gilson and DePoy say the project broadens accessibility parameters for a larger group of people. They note that software exists to convert text files to audio files for people with sight-impairments and audio files to text files for users with hearing-impairments. And there are programs to translate one language to another.

“The question is ‘is there a way to have a portal on a user’s computer that would be adjusted to literacy and comprehension levels?'” DePoy says.

The answer is yes. Gilson and DePoy earlier received a $10,000 Maine Technology Institute seed grant for market research to see if such software had been or could be created. They found that no such software existed. Trefoil principals Curtis Meadow and George Markowsky, who also is a computer science professor at UMaine, affirmed that they could, indeed, create such software.

The new portal is to be tested at the Literacy Volunteers of Bangor Center. When complete it will be available on the Web, where the public can access it. Gilson and DePoy expect to have the software running and the portal available for public use by this time next year. They also hope to patent the software, which they say could have wider-ranging applications.

Gilson, who considers the project part of Maine’s creative economy, says it presents the university an opportunity to use its resources to assist in the mission of disseminating educational information.

“Why couldn’t the University of Maine develop innovative software? Why do we have to look to Menlo Park?” he says.

Gilson and DePoy are being assisted in the project by graduate student B.J. Kitchin, also a research associate of the Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies.