Low-literate users with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD) and/or complex communication needs (CCN) require specific writing support. We present a system that interactively supports fast and correct writing of a variant of Leichte Sprache (LS; German term for easy-to-read German), slightly extended within and beyond the inner-sentential syntactic level. The system provides simple and intuitive dialogues for selecting options from a natural-language paraphrase generator. Moreover, it reminds the user to add text elements enhancing understandability, audience design, and text coherence. In earlier development phases, the system was evaluated with different groups of substitute users. Here, we report a case study with seven low-literate users with IDD.

Simplified languages are instruments for inclusion aiming to overcome language barriers. Leichte Sprache (LS), for instance, is a variety of German with reduced complexity (cf. Basic English). So far, LS is mainly provided for, but rarely written by, its target groups, e.g. people with cognitive impairments. One reason may be the lack of technical support during the process from message conceptualization to sentence realization. In the following, we present a system for assisted typing in LS whose accuracy and speed is largely due to the deployment of real time natural-language processing enabling efficient prediction and context-sensitive grammar support.