I'm curious whether individual-word highlighting is best for people with reading disabilities, or a broad, whole-sentence highlighting might actually be preferable.

When I'm reading my eye is jumping back and forth across the sentence. The demo made this abundantly clear -- it was actually very hard to just track the highlighted word.

Just using the fact that I consider myself a very good reader as an example, I wonder whether there are advantages to the eye being free to skip back and forth across a sentence.

I assume it might be as simple as a user-preference toggle, since you're already highlighting the sentence.

You could also try UIs where the highlighting was more "spread out," focused on the word being said but bleeding into the other words on either side (maybe up until the hard stop of the sentence boundary) to lead the eye toward it. I'm imagining something like the red-blue text color of the BeeLine editor.

My guess is, like many accessibility tools, it will vary by person! The Storyteller apps don't actually support this multi-level granularity demostrated in the demo here — until this iteration of the alignment algorithm, the timing wasn't good enough for word-level highlighting. So currently we only do sentence-level highlighting.

When we do roll out multi-level granularity, it will indeed be something that you can configure yourself, including how each level is indicated (e.g., you might want to set a background color on the sentence and underling the word) and whether a each level is indicated at all!

The "spread out" highlighting is a really neat idea, I don't think I've heard that suggestion before!