RESOURCES

Leveraging Liquid Mode to Scale Access and Use of Digital Materials

Since 2019, the EdTech Center @ World Education has partnered with Adobe and The Readability Consortium to advance the field of digital text readability. Our work helps to mitigate the challenges faced by those who access information on their smartphone devices. In pursuit of this goal, we have been field-testing Adobe’s free Acrobat Reader for mobile devices, specifically a feature called Liquid Mode, which reflows digital text in PDF documents, changing its presentation and making it possible for users to control how they view it. The personalization settings in Liquid Mode allow users to change line spacing, letter spacing, font size, and paragraph formatting.

World Education’s EdTech Center and Bantwana teams field-tested Liquid Mode in Malawi in 2023-24 as part of the US-AID funded Ana Patsogolo Activity (APA), which supports thousands of parents and other caregivers of children and adolescents living with HIV in Malawi. This paper describes the work done throughout this project and implications for the future in this work.