## 6 Conclusions and Next Steps  
In this paper, the conceptual design of a supporting software platform (BESPECIAL) to help dyslexic students during their academic career has been presented jointly with preliminary results. The functioning of BESPECIAL and its role within the wider project (VRAIlexia), aimed at mitigating the difficulties encountered by dyslexic students at university, have been addressed in detail, in order to show a proof of concept of the overall methodology that will lead to its final implementation. The platform takes as input the clinical reports of dyslexia, the answers to a self-assessment questionnaire and the results of a battery of psychometric tests to extract useful information about the issues and needs of dyslexic students at university. By relying on AI, it will be capable of predicting automatically which of the supporting methodologies are most suitable for each student, in terms of both best practices to be followed by teachers and institutions and digital tools to make the study material more accessible, given the difficulties they encountered during their academic career. A two-stage implementation of the platform is planned. In the first stage, AI will be trained with a significant number of the above-mentioned input data, so as to create a preliminary version of the predictor that can be considered category-specific, since it will be based on statistical data. In the second stage, each student will test the digital supporting tools and their reactions, improvements and residual difficulties will be evaluated. The results of the evaluation will feed back the AI, so as to improve the predictor by transforming it from category- to student-specific, as strongly recommended by experts to most usefully support people with dyslexia. The evaluation modules will be implemented in VR, given its capability to deliver material in a more engaging way and, at the same time, to easily gather the required information. This should help avoid problems such as reading impairments and lack of concentration, which often strike people with dyslexia. VR will also be used to simulate the difficulties encountered by them, in order to make teachers more conscious about the phenomenon and allow them intervene in order to mitigate it. At present, data from about 700 dyslexic students have been collected. A preliminary analysis has been carried out and first results about the most severe difficulties and the most helpful supporting tools and strategies have been obtained. In particular, concentration when alone is the issue that most affects dyslexic students, followed by memory impairments, especially in short-term and scheduling problems. Moreover, in general, all the presented issues significantly affect (average score higher than 3 out of 5 for all of them) the majority of dyslexic students (at least more than 88.9% of the students experience each issues), highlighting that providing them with proper support is fundamental. Concerning the supporting methodologies, highlighted keywords, a clear layout of the study material and use of images, summaries, concept maps and schemes have been proven to be the most useful tools, with an average score equal or higher than 3.8 out of 5. Conversely, audiobooks read by artificial voices and digital tutors are considered useless by about 1 in every 2 and 1 in every 4 students, respectively, underlining that interacting with machines instead of human beings should be avoided. Taking pauses during lessons, hosting lessons online, repeating the studied material and making the program and the slides of the course available, instead are considered the most suitable supporting strategies (average score higher than 4 out of 5) and should, thus, be taken into account as the best practices to follow. Furthermore, the auditory channel should be exploited more, by automatically or manually recording lessons, using audiobooks with a human voice, having someone read aloud the study material and preferring oral exams to written ones.