READIxTSAR 2026 Workshop, First Call for Papers May 2026, Palma de Mallorca, Spain https://readixtsar.github.io/

Hosted by LREC 2026 https://lrec2026.info/

READIxTSAR is a joint initiative between two previous workshops of mutual interest: Tools and Resources for REAding DIfficulties (READI, hosted at LREC 2020,22,24) and Text Simplification, Accessibility and Readability (TSAR, EMNLP 2022,24,25, RANLP 2023). This year at LREC, the committees of the two events have merged to deliver a joint event, uniting accessibility research communities under a common umbrella. We aim for READIxTSAR to be a focal point for communities of researchers working on reading difficulties, accessibility and simplification to network, share best practice and form new collaborations.

*Motivation and Context*

The growth of educational and assistive technologies for reading, aimed at enhancing the performance of individuals with disabilities, provides an important setting for Text Simplification research. The field of special education has had a longstanding interest in technology and the potential it holds for individuals with language/speech disabilities, cognitive disorders, etc. (Edyburn, 2000). This workshop aims to present state-of-the-art applications and approaches in technology-enhanced reading and innovations in text accessibility. The workshop will address specialized technology, tools, and resources, their impact on learning to read and comprehension, and innovative works spanning research to fieldwork, particularly in light of recent AI advances.

Research in automatic text simplification has evolved from deep learning methods (Martin et al., 2020; Maddela et al., 2021; Sheang and Saggion, 2021) to leveraging foundational large language models (Kew et al. 2023; Cripwell et al. 2023; Farajidizaji et al. 2024) through fine-tuning and prompt-engineering. Despite these advancements, the Text Accessibility and Text Simplification communities must address critical areas, including: designing better evaluation metrics, developing context-aware simplification solutions, creating appropriate language resources, deploying simplification in real-world environments, studying discourse factors, and identifying factors affecting readability. Addressing these issues requires collaboration across CL/NLP, machine learning, UI/UX, accessibility professionals, and public organizations, whom we invite to participate through publication and attendance.

*Topics of Interest* The joint event will accept submissions at the intersection of the research areas of the two workshops, as well as submissions that are targeted to the specific research interests of either workshop. An indicative list of topics of interest are listed below. - Lexical, syntactic and discourse adaptations or simplifications; - ATS for sentences, paragraphs, or documents; - Controllable text simplification and text generation of adapted contents; - Measuring and evaluating readability and text complexity; - LLMs and agentic LLMs for text simplification, text adaptation and readability - The role of LLMs in supporting reading - Complex word identification (CWI) and lexical complexity prediction (LCP); - Models, corpora, lexicons for text adaptation and text assessment; - Evaluation of text adaptation or ATS systems; - Meaning representation and multimodal text adaptation; - Educational devices and/or smart technologies for supporting reading and learning; - Domain specific applications of the above topics (e.g. health, legal).

*Important Dates* Submission Deadline: 16th February 2026 Notification of Results: 16th March 2026 Camera Ready: 30th March 2026 READIxTSAR Workshop: 11th, 12th or 16th May 2026

*Submission Instructions* We invite submissions on topics of interest between 4 and 8 pages of content. The page limit of 8 pages does not include acknowledgements, references, potential Ethics Statements and discussion on Limitations in line with the policy of the main LREC conference. All submissions must follow the LREC stylesheet (https://lrec2026.info/authors-kit/).

All submissions are double-blind. Any submissions which are not-anonymised, over-length, poorly formatted or make excessive use of appendices to circumvent page limits are liable to desk-rejection.

At the time of submission, authors are offered the opportunity to share related language resources with the community. All repository entries are linked to the LRE Map (https://lremap.elra.info/), which provides metadata for the resource.

As in previous editions for Camera Ready a Plain Summary will be requested.

*“Share your LRs!” Initiative* When submitting a paper from the START page, authors will be asked to provide essential information about resources (in a broad sense, i.e. also technologies, standards, evaluation kits, etc.) that have been used for the work described in the paper or are a new result of your research. Moreover, ELRA encourages all LREC authors to share the described LRs (data, tools, services, etc.) to enable their reuse and replicability of experiments (including evaluation ones).

*Organizing Committee*

- Matthew Shardlow, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK - Thomas François, UCLouvain, Belgium - Raquel Amaro, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal - Jorge Baptista, Universidade do Algarve & INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal - Rémi Cardon, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain - Eugénio Ribeiro, Iscte-IUL & INESC-ID Lisboa, Portugal - Regina Stodden, University Bielefeld, Germany - Rodrigo Wilkens, University of Exeter, UK - Horacio Saggion, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain - Amalia Todirascu, Université de Strasbourg, France

Contact: readixtsar@googlegroups.com