We present an overview of LARA, the Learning And Reading Assistant, an open source platform for easy creation and use of multimedia annotated texts designed to support the improvement of reading skills. The paper is divided into three parts. In the first, we give a brief summary of LARA’s processing. In the second, we describe some generic functionality specially relevant for reading assistance: support for phonetically annotated texts, support for image-based texts, and integrated production of text-to-speech (TTS) generated audio. In the third, we outline some of the larger projects so far carried out with LARA, involving development of content for learning second and foreign (L2) languages such as Icelandic, Farsi, Irish, Old Norse and the Australian Aboriginal language Barngarla, where the issues involved overlap with those that arise when trying to help students improve first-language (L1) reading skills. All software and almost all content is freely available.

We describe recent extensions to the open source Learning And Reading Assistant (LARA) supporting image-based and phonetically annotated texts. We motivate the utility of these extensions both in general and specifically in relation to endangered and archaic languages, and illustrate with examples from the revived Australian language Barngarla, Icelandic Sign Language, Irish Gaelic, Old Norse manuscripts and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Sign language is used by many people who were born deaf or who became deaf early in life use as their first and/or preferred language. There is no writing system for sign languages; texts are signed on video. As a consequence, texts in sign language are hard to navigate, search and annotate. The BiBiKit project is an easy to use authoring kit which is being developed and enables students, teachers, and virtually everyone to write and read bilingual bimodal texts and thereby creating electronic productions, which link text to sign language video. The main purpose of the project is to develop software that enables the user to link text to video, at the word, phrase and/or sentence level. The software will be developed for sign language and vice versa, but can be used to easily link text to any video: e.g. to add annotations, captions, or navigation points. The three guiding principles are: Software that is 1) stable, 2) easy to use, and 3) foolproof. A web based platform will be developed so the software is available whenever and wherever.