Alex Tavares is a recent graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he developed the Read Read, a device to allow blind and visually impaired children to learn how to read without the need for direct teacher intervention.
After participating in the Harvard iLab Venture Incubation Program this summer, Tavares pitched the Read Read to a panel of expert judges during the Get Started Rhode Island pitch competition in October.
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Learn MoreTavares spoke with Providence Business News about how the Read Read is already tackling the challenge of illiteracy.
PBN: How did you first start working on the issue of phonics and literacy for blind students?
TAVARES: I volunteered as a literacy instructor for students with and without disabilities for about 15 years and did the work professionally for about seven. It killed me that my students had no way to practice the foundational skills I was teaching them when I wasn’t by their side. I searched for a device that I could have them use to practice but found none that aligned with the way that teachers teach – so I created one.
In designing a tool that would enable scalable, manipulative-based phonics, I learned about the extent of the illiteracy crisis for people who are blind. Only 8 percent of blind students in the U.S. can use braille, and 97 percent of blind adults who don’t know braille are unemployed. I worked with former and current teachers of the visually impaired at Harvard and the Perkins School for the Blind, as well as world-renowned experts in pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning, to make sure that my device, the Read Read, was designed to meet the needs of the most diverse spectrum of people possible, including children and adults who are visually impaired or blind.
PBN: Has technology like the Read Read changed how schools think about accessible education?
TAVARES: There has been a growing trend toward digitizing school curriculum, which makes sense. However, for fundamental skills, such as literacy and numeracy, large-scale studies and meta-analyses have shown that fully digital platforms (i.e. computers and tablets) don’t provide the salience requisite for learning foundational concepts such as one-to-one correspondence in phonics and the concept of numbers in mathematics.
So, schools have doubled down on manipulative-based pedagogy, which has been shown to be efficacious since the 1950s. The problem we’re facing is the unscalability of this pedagogy. Several companies have introduced platforms to merge physical manipulatives with digital feedback, but none have done it in a way that emulates best-practice instruction – this is what the Read Read has done.
PBN: How does the Read Read actually work?
TAVARES: It uses a patent-pending technology to give students the same audio feedback that would otherwise be provided by an expert teacher while they use manipulatives to learn and practice foundational skills of various disciplines: word/object correspondence, phonics, mathematics, music and even computer coding. The user interface of the Read Read is simple and elegant, despite the powerful processing power and advanced electronics inside.
PBN: Could the Read Read potentially be used in other applications as well? For example, to help teach phonics to adult [English as a Second Language] learners?
TAVARES: The Read Read will be the go-to tool for teaching phonics and numeracy to anyone, including people who are visually impaired or blind, people on the autism spectrum, people who have dyslexia or dyscalculia, and English Language Learners. The Read Read is not limited to English, as analogues to these skills exist in every language.
PBN: How will winning the Get Started RI prize help your business?
TAVARES: The generous grant provides us with an important runway to begin manufacturing, and the ability to partially offset the manufacturer’s cost for beta units for Schools for the Blind participating in our pilots. The media coverage has also allowed us to inform the public about the illiteracy crisis among students who are blind in the United States and worldwide. We have seen an outpouring of support via small donations on our website, www.thereadread.com, which I invite your readers to visit to learn more.
Galen Auer is a PBN contributing writer.