Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users | Hacker News Reader

Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users

uxmovement.com

29 pointsbankerofpawns20 comments

Short of a <pre> block or a PDF, how do you put double spaces after a sentence on the web? In browsers, that's reduced to a single space automatically.

 [regular space]

   would work too, but stops the line from breaking after sentences.

Not that its a good idea... But that's how you'd do it :)

How could you use the innocent non-breaking space for such evil?

More seriously - is anything like that used in the wild? I'm just trying to figure out why they gave a suggestion to stop doing something that it takes such improbable work-arounds to do in the first place. Double-spacing after sentences sticks out like a sore thumb in proportional fonts.

I seem to remember seeing a WYSIWYG text editor add those nbsps when there was more than one space in a row, but I could be mistaken.

Yes, at least some of them do.

Leaving some clients to use nbsps in place of tables or tabs to try and layout columns, bullet lists, etc. Eek!

I think there might be Wordpress addons that do this. It looks like Patrick's blog (http://www.kalzumeus.com/) uses one and I've seen a few other blogs with the same thing. It's annoying.

You're going to hate me for this, but when I was a middle school teacher I gave all of my quizzes in Comic Sans font because I had heard that Comic Sans was an easy font for dyslexics to read. (I have yet to come across proof of this, though.)

Edit: this mentions Comic Sans as a somewhat dyslexic-friendly font: http://www.angelfire.com/tn3/writing/DesignUsersReadDis.pdf

When you use justified text, you’re not only making text difficult to read for non-dyslexic users, but even more so for dyslexic users.

Since when is fully justified text deemed difficult to read? I guess that's why nearly all printed books use fully justified typesetting?

Most of the criticisms of justified text are based on the fact that web browsers use "naive" justification, without intelligent hyphenation. This can lead to

    lines  where    words   are   spaced   far   apart

which many people find harder to read.

Printed books are justified and hyphenated, so this is not an issue.

It is not just about hyphenation. Even with good hyphenation you will still leave rivers of white space unless you are intelligently managing word spacing.

Unfortunately, browsers are not the only offenders here. Almost almost every word processor in existence is brain-dead when it comes to justification. To my knowledge, there are only a handful of programs that get it right: InDesign, Quark, and Word (but only if you turn on a "Compatibility" option called, "Use Full Justification like Word Perfect"). I am deliberately excluding dinosaurs like Word Perfect and Pagemaker, which also get it right. Oh, and TeX. I am excluding TeX. Tough cookies.

What do I mean by "right"? That there should be more than one tool in your line-breaking toolbox. Hyphenation is one tool. The other is minimum word spacing. This means that instead of only allowing space between words to grow, you also allow it to shrink, up to a set limit. In almost every word processor (Including OOo and derivates, Pages, Mellel and Nisus on the Mac, etc.), no attempt whatsoever is made to reduce the spacing between words to allow another word to fit, or a hyphenation break to occur at a better location.

Professional layout tools also allow the letter-spacing to grow and shrink and you can tell them to stretch or squeeze letters.

Doing this is obviously very controversial but I think that allowing InDesign to stretch and squeeze letters by a percent or half a percent is visually not noticeable (at least with body text) and can noticeably reduce the number of large holes in your text, especially if the columns of your text are relatively narrow.

Other word processors don’t give you that option at all.

There's also a TeX package, microtype, which does this same thing (among other optimizations, such as punctuation overhang).

I've found that text with variable font widths looks "off" to my eyes, but because the effect is so subtle I'm not sure that this isn't just psychological.

I suppose it depends on whether you're using a fixed width font. If you are, then an algorithm (probably making using of dynamic programming) can easily produce optimal line breaks, where "optimal" has some specific definition.

You should never justify fixed-width fonts, only proportional fonts.

You also shouldn’t think of spaces between words as multiples of one space width. When you are justifying texts, a space has no defined width, it has an upper bound and a lower bound.

I also don’t think that algorithms are the problem. InDesign does a beautiful job at typesetting paragraphs. You can enter an upper bound and lower bound for the space between words and you can display violations of those bounds (the offending words will be highlighted) which you can then manually fine tune. InDesign also offers many other options for hyphenation and justification. (Other professional layout tools have similar options.)

The problem might rather be that the effect of such sophisticated typesetting is subtle and it is unlikely that a program like Pages on Mac OS X will be used by typesetters and designers who care about things like that.

Is there a reason that web browsers these days don't do hyphenation? It's not like the algorithms to do it are at all new, and while I can see it adding some amount of time to the rendering process, my intuition is that time ought to be small given the amount of computing power we can throw at it.

We had a discussion about this several months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1669436

They recommend not using pure black text on pure white foreground, recommending toning both the background and foreground toward grey, but never mention the possibility of light-on-dark, for avoiding that whole "staring into the spotlight" feeling.

When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Sure, it's good to keep disadvantaged users in mind, but some counterpoints:

1) As already mentioned, you have to go out of your way to double-space after periods in webpages. It's something to keep in mind, sure, but it's rare.

3) Gray on gray. As I started reading the article, I found that it was a little difficult to read because of low contrast.

5) Serif fonts. Used properly, serif fonts increase readability for normals.

6) Italics. You shouldn't be using italics for lengthy tracts anyway, because it's meant to be an effect signifying something (in-line quote, foreign word etc). It's meant to be 'unusual' to mark something as different and should be used in short doses anyway.

Particularly with respect to #3 and #5, the lesson to take away should be "know your audience". If you're writing for the general public, keep dyslexics in mind, but don't make readability harder for the majority to satisfy a minority - particularly with respect to contrast.

Sounds like someone needs to tell the Dyslexic Association of America about Readability (or maybe a dyslexic programmer should tweak it first).

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

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