## 3 Background, Motivation and Purpose of the VRAIlexia Project
Figure 3: Rate of dyslexic students over all the SLD students attending university, according to the Tuscia case study. Figure 2: Rate of dyslexic students attending university according to the 2019 report of Ministry of Education and Ministry of University and Research [75] (**a**) and to Tuscia case study (**b**). Summarizing the statistics shown above, four main facts stand out: (i) people with SLDs are a significant percentage of the global population; (ii) the vast majority of them experience dyslexia; (iii) the presence of this disorder affects the academic career in terms of both graduation time dilation and abandonments; (iv) this problem strikes mainly degree courses in humanities. The VRAIlexia project starts from these assumptions and, within the first three years of the project, intends to achieve five tangible outcomes to overcome all the main difficulties encountered by dyslexic students at university and eliminate, or at least reduce, the gap with respect to non-dyslexic students. More specifically, in addition to the software platform BESPECIAL, which represents both the core of the project and the focus of this paper, the other four outcomes are the ones listed below. 1. A battery of tests in VR to assess the skills of dyslexic students, which will allow teachers to better and more easily understand the issues of them. 2. An online shared repository containing all the digital modules, resources, tools and any other kind of material that can be useful to implement innovative teaching and learning methods. 3. A training path consisting in two events, the first one addressed to the improvement of dyslexia awareness from teachers and the second one addressed to dyslexic students to enhance their self-entrepreneurial mindsets. Both events will be organized by experts of various disciplines, according to the Universal Design Learning methodology [76]. 4. A memorandum of understanding for the creation of common inclusion strategies among European higher education institutions. Figure 4: Rate of dyslexic students over the total number of SLD university students in sciences and humanities, according to the Tuscia case study. Figure 5: Average number of ECTS achieved per year: comparison between dyslexic and non-dyslexic students globally and specifically for sciences and humanities, according to the Tuscia case study. It is easy to understand how these outcomes have the potentiality to represent a valid opportunity to eliminate or at least mitigate significantly the above-reported issues, related to the enrolment of dyslexic students in university. In addition, they will allow to define a standardized approach, which is likely to increase students' motivation to complete their career and to move the first steps in the work market. The high level of intricacy of the SLDs spectrum requires not dealing with all the disorders at the same time, but focusing on each singularly. Since dyslexia is absolutely the prevailing SLD among the world population, VRAlexia will focus on it. In addition, the intrinsic diversity in teaching/learning different disciplines [77] suggests thinking of specific methodologies for each of them. Humanities being the disciplines more challenging for dyslexic students, only them will be considered within VRAIlexia. An extension to the other SLD types and to scientific disciplines has been already projected and is likely to be performed at a later time. The previously listed assumptions, jointly with the information obtained from the literature analysis, have also been taken into account in the design of BESPECIAL that, as mentioned, is in charge of providing dyslexic students with ad hoc strategies and tools to support them during university, so as to try to mitigate the career slowdown and abandonments phenomenon. In order to produce specific material for each student (a fundamental factor to achieve the goal [60; 61]), the platform will be implemented starting from the individual issues they experience and according to their precise needs.