We are pleased to announce the winners of the Facebook Global Literacy & Accessibility Challenge Research Awards. At Facebook, we strive to build communities across the globe and bring the world closer together. To do so, we need to reduce the barrier for everyone to participate, regardless of their backgrounds and abilities. Lack of literacy skills has been shown as one of the top challenges for people to adopt technologies and take part in the social communications online. With these research awards, Facebook is supporting new and innovative research to understand and address global literacy and accessibility issues. The findings from this research will be shared publicly with the research community. No Facebook data will be provided to award recipients.

The winners were chosen from a strong pool of submissions and represent a wide range of geographical regions, academic disciplines and topics. This diverse slate of research is well-positioned to help advance our understanding of literacy-related challenges and the technologies that can help solve them.

The four winning proposals and their topic areas are:

Reading Strategy Informed Text Simplification and Error Correction
Anders Søgaard, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Literacy and (Un)Documented Female Migrants in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Channarong Intahchomphoo, University of Ottawa, Canada

Eye-tracking of Same Language Subtitling on Film Songs and Dialog
Brij Kothari, PlanetRead, India

Literacy in Native Speakers, English Language Learners and Dyslexics
Anastasia A Stoops, University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), United States

We also selected the following six runners-up:

Struggles of Low-Income Low-Literacy Working Women with Mobile Technologies
Ahmed Sabbir Arif, University of California – Merced (UC Merced), United States

Facebook as an Instrument of Transformation in Adult Literacy
Daphne W. Ntiri, Wayne State University, United States

Technology Adoption among Farmers in Ghana: Case of Vodafone Farmers’ Club
Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, African Rights Initiative International, Ghana

How Literacy is Obtained: Understanding the Progression between Grades
Chenhao Tan, University of Colorado–Boulder (CU Boulder), United States

Video Games for Literacy Interventions with Children in Poverty Contexts
Matías Lopez-Rosenfeld, Asociación Civil Propuesta DALE!- CONICET, Argentina

Using Technology to Close the Literacy Gap Among Minority Language Students
Dr. Rebecca J. Collie, University of New South Wales, Australia

All winners and runner-ups are invited to our offices at Menlo Park, California mid next year. We will be looking forward to learning and sharing more about their exciting work then.