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Comment by osteele | Hacker News Reader

The reading task involves a number of subtasks. If any of these don't work well, it's “dyslexia”. Different dyslexics have different symptoms and experiences depending on what part of the pipeline is affected how. I'm not surprised that a web page designed to simulate one person's experience doesn't match others'.

For an accessible but informative intro-level text, I recommend _Psychology of Reading_, by Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, and Clifton. (I took intro grad-level cognitive psychology from Rayner and Pollatsek.) One anecdote I remember from the first edition involved a subject who couldn't perform left-to-right saccades; she was dyslexic in English, but wouldn't have been in Hebrew or Arabic.

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This is a good representation of what my dyslexia is like: http://bin.ddai.us/dys/lib/textjumble.png

I describe it like reading through a straw. I can only focus on one word at a time, while most people can take in more words at once. Consequently, my reading speed is much slower than most. Oddly, it hasn't affected my ability to code; I can "see" code just fine.

I'm sure you've come across it, but in case you haven't, have you seen Spritz? http://spritzinc.com/

There is an open-source alternative that you can use as a bookmarklet https://github.com/ds300/jetzt

> Oddly, it hasn't affected my ability to code; I can "see" code just fine.

Just out of interest, does it change by programming language? I imagine all the "structural support" in most popular programming languages would be helpful, but I know very little about dyslexia...

All languages I've encountered so far seem to be fine. As long as it doesn't require me to linearly read it, I can see things just fine. I haven't encountered one but I would imagine a language with tightly packed syntax would be difficult for me to read efficiently.

So that seems like it would be devastating to your reading comprehension. What can you/did you do to improve?

I haven't done anything to improve. In fact, I only found out I read differently about two years ago; which means I went 30 years not knowing I had anything wrong with me. As for it impacting my reading comprehension, it don't think it has. That being said, there isn't any way for me to know for sure, since I'll never experience what it's like to see text normally. Why do you think it would impact comprehension?

Oddly, it hasn't affected my ability to code; I can "see" code just fine.

Given the representation, I'm not surprised --- a lot of people, including those non-dyslexic, read code very differently from how they read prose: by focusing on tiny sections at a time. I'd guess that if you tried to read code the way you read prose, by trying to see big chunks of it at a time, you'd quickly experience the same feeling.

...maybe check if it's "convergence insufficiency".

Thanks for reference, just ordered the 2nd edition.

"Different dyslexics have different symptoms and experiences depending on what part of the pipeline is affected how"

One student that I worked with a couple of years ago talked of the words jumping and changing size on the stark white page. She had lilac coloured paper for handouts &c.

OA has been added to my teacher-training list of pages.

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