Reading is integral to learning, and over the past 30 years, technology has dramatically changed how students read. With Liquid Mode in the Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app, it’s easier to read digital documents on mobile devices. Liquid Mode uses AI to reformat PDF documents while also giving readers the power to adjust font size and space to create a custom reading environment.
Alongside researchers at University of Central Florida (UCF), the nonprofit Readability Matters, and Google, Adobe recently launched The Readability Consortium to explore technologies, tests, and tools that will help individuals maximize readability. By helping students discover their best readability settings, the Consortium aims to make reading a more enjoyable experience for students, improving comprehension and learning.
Today we would like to introduce a few pilot programs and research from the education world that demonstrate some of the potential benefits of using Liquid Mode to improve readability.
Making a 200-page manual easier to read
Maryland’s Frederick Community College (FCC) provides a diverse range of affordable and flexible learning opportunities to all types of students. Many adult learners benefit from FCC’s Bridge to Careers courses, which combine occupational training and workplace readiness skills with English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses to help students thrive in new careers. Students in these courses come from diverse backgrounds. Some are new immigrants while others have been in the United States for a decade or more. The learners’ communicative abilities across the four language domains — speaking, listening, reading, and writing — varies.
Course instructors sometimes struggle to bridge the diverse reading levels within the classroom to engage all students with critical texts. When designing the curriculum for Bridge to Commercial Driver’s License (CDL), a course for students aiming to become commercial drivers, ESOL instructor Rachel Riggs thought that Liquid Mode might be a good way to make complex texts more accessible to the adult students.
“I had heard about Liquid Mode through the EdTech Center at World Education, and it seemed like an interesting fit to pilot in the Bridge to CDL course,” says Riggs. “The commercial driver’s license manual is a 200-page-long PDF document. Liquid Mode reformats the manual to display much more naturally on small smartphone screens, allowing students to study on the go.”
With Liquid Mode, students no longer need to spend time pinching and zooming on their phones and scrolling around the document. Instead, all of the text flows smoothly. Students can easily change font size or adjust spacing, making the document even easier to read with clear and crisp letters. Intelligent outlines and search functionality helps students to find relevant sections much faster.
One student described how she would study the manual on her phone while her husband drove, taking advantage of every spare minute in her busy day to advance her education. Another commented that using Liquid Mode allowed him to jump directly to the section the instructor had assigned, making reading on their phone more accessible and less time consuming.
Now a part of World Education as a digital learning specialist, Riggs is excited to promote Liquid Mode, particularly for the diverse population of adult learners. “Programs that work with a lot of PDF documents will likely find Liquid Mode to be very useful,” says Riggs. “In adult education, we see a large range of skills with culturally, linguistically, and academically diverse learners in particular. I’m very interested to connect Adobe with more educators to see how technology can help address accessibility and equity for adult learners and educators.”