## 3 Background, Motivation and Purpose of the VRAIlexia Project  
The decision to develop the VRAIlexia project and implement the BESPECIAL platform was born from a case study (referred as \"Tuscia case study\") conducted at the University of Tuscia (an Italian academic institution, whose headquarters are located in Viterbo, Italy) concerning the number, distribution and academic outcomes of students with SLDs. The results, considered jointly with the global statistics about the topic, pointed out some crucial issues about the academic opportunities of such students. According to the works of [4; 72], between 6.25% and 12.50% of the world population experiences SLDs, which means around 875 million people worldwide. However, the datum is likely to be underestimated, since some evidence [73] makes the percentage increase to up to 21.25%, that is, around 1.6 billion people. Such numbers give an idea of the scale of this phenomenon. Among them, about 80% are dyslexic, though the remaining 20% suffer from other SLDs [4]. It is also important to note that two or more disorders may occur together. However, dyslexia alone is the most common learning disorder, with a percentage of between 35% and 50% of SLD cases [74]. An investigation by Italian Ministry of Education and Ministry of University and Research that was carried out in 2019 [75] reported a similar distribution of the SLD typologies within the students of national primary and secondary schools; of all the students with SLDs, 34% are affected only by dyslexia (Figure 1). The report also showed that students with SLDs constitute 3.2% of the total students at primary and secondary school, whereas at university, they constitute only 1.2% (Figure 2a). This drastic decrease clearly highlights how university can become an insurmountable wall for them and how some actions in this regard are necessary to mitigate the main problems  
Figure 1: Rate of dyslexic students over all the SLD students attending Italian primary and secondary school, according to the 2019 report of Ministry of Education and Ministry of University and Research [75]. they experience during academic life. According to the Tuscia case study, the percentage of university students with SLDs is slightly higher (Figure 2b), but consistent with [75]. The rate of dyslexic students over all the students with SLDs is also in line with both primary/secondary school datum and the statistic at global level, showing that this disorder affects 39% of academic population (Figure 3) and is the most frequent one. Another interesting fact is that dyslexic students attending a degree course in the sciences constitute 44.3% of the total number of students with SLDs. Instead, they constitute only 25.8% in degree courses in humanities (Figure 4). This matches with the typical problems that dyslexics experience, which have an adverse impact on tasks that are more commonly required in the second branch, like reading, memorizing, exposing concepts aloud, etc. The conspicuous presence of such tasks is likely to discourage the enrolment in humanities courses or leads to their abandonment. Further evidence comes from the graph in Figure 5, which shows the average number of university credits in the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) achieved per year by dyslexic and non-dyslexic students, both globally and specifically for sciences and humanities. The global data show that dyslexic people accumulate, on average, six ECTS less, which correspond, approximately, to one exam per year lost compared to non-dyslexics. This illustrates a situation of hardship for dyslexic students that must be faced thoroughly, in order to guarantee equal opportunities to them. The specific data for sciences and humanities confirm the above regarding the greater difficulties encountered by dyslexic students in the second branch. The difference in the achieved ECTS rises up to 6.7 for humanities, compared to 4.6 for sciences.