Website allows you to experience what it is like to live with dyslexia (2016)
geon.github.io
geon.github.io
It's an interesting idea. I appreciate the goal. I just don't know that this is anything like the real thing. I'm not sure it's possible to know what it's subjectively like.
From playing around with this at worst they were equally unreadable[0], the best case was the first/last letter helped. Eventually I'd be able to decipher any word but by no means did my brain just visually did the replacement "on the fly" or close to it.
It would be interesting to see the study debunking this and the methodology. Do they take into account how many position each letter is shifted, how many had switched order not just shifted to the same direction or same number of shifts, will phonetic languages make a difference (in English removing one letter can vastly change the phonetics and make you miss the similarities with the original), etc.
[0] A quick and likely imperfect example resulting in words that cannot be recognized despite the high commonality:
something [original]
stnhioemg [1st/last]
msgethion [4th-7th]
gnmethios [3rd-7th]
gnihtemos [reverse spelling]
But when it comes to writing its a different ballgame. With a computer its not so tricky (and its easy to hide... hello backspace), but with a pen and paper I make mistakes all time. After many years of practice I am fairly used to taking my time and making sure I spell properly now, but I still make mistakes, and its still kind of shit when you think you've nailed the spelling, re-read everything and then someone points out mistakes you didn't even know were there. Especially the people who act like you didn't even try... Oh well.
But when it comes to typing I do OK, I transpose letters here and there, but I get by and I can read just fine, it's just in my writing that one can really tell there is something off.
Then you are one up on me. My handwriting is so bad that I myself often have difficulty reading it. It has never made much difference to me professionally. Anything that really matters is typed into some sort of device.
People at meetings often comment that I take few notes. Typing during a meeting is impolite imho and my handwriting of notes would be less than useful. So I just listen and have learned to remember what was said until I can minute it later.
The website in the OP reminds me more of the experience of trying to read during a semi-lucid dream, or my experience with deliriants. The "visual fuzz" created from letters jumping around and changing before your eyes. I would look at my clock and it might be two different times superimposed on each other, or just a completely different language or set of symbols.
It's a nerve-wracking experience when caused by a deliriant, but it's also a common tool I use to help me realize I'm in a dream to break into lucidness. The clock will almost never read the same way twice in a dream! Often neither will a sign or piece of paper.
I've found I mostly just momentarily see things that are not there, like at all. It doesn't even surprise me much anymore, not that being used to sleep deprivation is a good thing :)
There's an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don't make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there's no easy way for your brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there's no equivalent of numbers not making sense.
For example, if I'm given a reading passage, I can accurately answer questions about it. But once those are put in A/B/C/D or 1/2/3/4 options, I will absolutely mess them up. I will know the answer is A, I will put my pencil down on the A bubble, I will fill in A, then later on I'll see that somehow I filled in C.
I had this problem a lot on tests and thought that maybe I was just being dumb and not having the correct answer, since usually you only get a scantron sheet back with zero context. About 3 years ago I started doing practice tests for language learning, of which many questions were multiple choice. I'd write the full answer for extra practice, finish the test, wait a couple minutes, then go back and check my answers. The written part of the answer would match up most of the time. The letter/number preceding it was wrong 1/4 of the time.
I've also had it with math exams a few times, where I mix up digits usually around decimal points. Sometimes it even happens when coding and those are really tough problems to debug.
I'm also terrible at holding numbers in my head, if I do not keep paying conscious attention to it, they get reversed or substituted. I remember all my PIN's by the motion you used to input them instead of the number itself.
Programming made me discover how much I love math, but I still miss a lot of basics because I never 'got it' in elementary school, and thus ended up in the lowest levels of math in highschool, where it was extremely boring and tedious (because it was actually way to easy), I wish I could send a programming book/numberphile videos to my 12-year-old self, because I think I could have ended up using high-school time way more effectively, instead of just going through the motions.
In school, I’d think I’d be doing great on my math problems. When I’d get my work back, I did terrible because I’d accidentally change the numbers in the middle of the problem. I also always had a feeling that I missed some foundational information because nothing ever clicked for me. I put it down to switching schools a few times, but I think it may have been something more than that now. I was actually scared to even try programming because I was always told you need to be good at math, so I thought I would fail terribly.
This is a huge problem for me too, but I take solace in the observation that that isn't _math_, that's _arithmetic_.
If not, there exists specific training that helps a significant fraction of people to get better at handling the actual numbers, training which also is completely unrelated to maths.
While my improvement after 30min a day for a couple of weeks was something of an aberration in magnitude (from 70"th percentile to 110'th, from well below average to above), it was reportedly quite consistent in increasing recall percentile with ~10% as measured against the general population. Which especially at lower percentiles is quite impressive!
It's not really realated, but to me the whole thing was quite a strange experience! After roughly a week of daily practice, it suddenly felt like I found a part of my brain I didn't even know existed. I could suddenly pick numbers, or sequences of "lights" turning on on the screen, seemingly from nothing! The first times it happened I didn't really remember the sequence, I only knew which button to push, but after a little more practice I started to be able to consciously recall the sequence from this new place in my mind.
It was truly stunning to be suddenly able to look at a code at the car wash, and sometimes remember it for hours afterwards!
Me, who several times had forgotten my card pin, who though I loved and was good at maths had to read digit by digit to get the numbers right (and often still didn't), and who had in general tended to permute any kind of number more often than not for the ~30 years I had known what numbers were!
The brain is so strange sometimes.
can you describe the treatment protocol to us in brief or link us to additional resources on this topic? this sounds very interesting and potentially very helpful.
My whole life I’ve been swapping 2 and 5. Or I go to write 6 and 5 comes out. Stuff like that.
Only numbers tho. Letters are fine.
One trick I’ve found when checking numbers is to compare them both forwards and backwards as a sort of checksum. This has become less of an issue now that you can almost always copypaste but still comes handy
Since I've realized this, it is intriguing to me in the same kind of way, that what we see and what there "is" __in a face__ is quite different!
I wonder if dyslexia is as “simple” as a saccadic deficiency at root...
Edit: well, whaddya know. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9842764/
I also think dyslexia is a much wider category with many different root cause than most people talk about. Kinda like how autism exists on a spectrum the same thing is true for dyslexia.
When I try this the text and meaning changes, but the context stays the same. For example reading an invitation: It stays an invitation but date and location change whenever I read it.
I'll see a bunch of things, all the same colour. Then I'll realise it's supposed to be colour coded and they'll start swapping colours until they settle down. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
I had this a lot in school with red and green on the whiteboard.
I can see the letters, I could read the words, but they held little meaning to me.
Almost as if 90% were in another language, yet I could grasp the basic gist, but nothing more.
Oddly I have almost no trouble reading this page.
A similar thing happens to me if there's to many of the same number/letter together (for example, in 000043452 I have a lot of trouble counting the number of zeroes).
I always thought it was normal, but it feels very similar to this website. Do I have a mild form of dyslexia? or is it normal?
I've always assumed this was laziness on my part, and so I've recently tried to re-learn music reading, and it is getting easier (recently found PianoBooster software which has been quite useful), but still finding it difficult to read even a single note.
There was a recommendation when I went to Uni to get tested for dyslexia, even if you have no symptoms, because more people have it than you would think. And given that there is a range of types and symptoms, the possibility that this is a form of dyslexia is reasonably high.
That said, the fact that anyone can read anything is fairly remarkable when you think about it. I don't know whether we have any evolutionary basis for the repeated recognition of small characters, but I doubt it, and if so the fact that a large proportion of our brains are malleable enough to be trained for it is something impressive.
I'm just gonna have to keep practising and hope something clicks. Good luck!
"Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
Sometimes I think this is an artifact of occasionally looking at groups of words as a single term. If I read each word deliberately, I don't encounter this problem.
From my understanding of dyslexia, this is not it.
What's the frequency with which a dyslexic person experiences this?
....... from my other comment:
See, for example... when I first read this comment, I read: "Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it (eye movement sensor) correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
...
This is getting really common for me. I'll read a sentence in a way that makes perfect sense, then go back, re-read it, and discover I misread one of the words. It's frustrating because I don't have any indication something is amiss. Is this abnormal?
I don’t understand how it would be possible to ever replicate it though, unless someone could be cured and then judge it’s realism. I understood this site to be replicating the reading experience, rather than a literal reflection of what you see.
For example: Doing reading comprehension tests in school, I would often perform well, if not a bit slowly. Given a book report, however, I would not be able to keep up such effort for very long; reading that way was very strenuous. Furthermore, when tasked with reading out loud, I slow to a crawl, begin to stutter, and translate inaccurately.
Anyways, my point is that, we can sometimes read normally, it can just be extra difficult.
As for this example specifically, I can't speak to its authenticity since I don't have the "moving characters" symptoms. My issues mostly revolve around poor eye tracking.
I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times, and managed to see the name Grandalf instead of Gandalf every single time.
I was looking up a quote from a former Intel CEO just tonight and found out that his name wasn't Paul Ortelli, but Paul Otellini.
I insert letters that are not there, remove letters that are, and reorder whatever is left all the time.
Yet somehow, I'm also a speed reader.
If you go back and look at early examples of my handwriting, every "S" was backwards, my b and d were often flipped the wrong way, as were my p and q.
My spelling was atrocious, but my vocabulary was way above average.
I also had the issue with transposing numbers while doing math.
It wasn't until I reached High School that I had a teacher who recognized dyslexia when he saw it.
One of my relations wrote completely mirrored for a time, that was interesting. It did make me wonder if their brain was flipping the entire World; they've corrected it now. It reminded me of, da Vinci, who I think write in mirror writing for himself but used regular writing when writing for others.
I still have to double take on "invertebrate", because I originally read it as "intervertebrate" or something like that :).
It might just be that the brain "shortcuts" some things and change the way it's perceived. Insertion of an r in some places is an actual linguistic phenomenon (more on the Otellini case).
I wish there was a speed / interval slider to this simulator, assuming this is 10 speed and 10 interval I'd say a 8 speed 2 interval (fast change, but less often) would give more realistic results
The open dyslexic font helps a lot, (pity it's fugly)[https://www.opendyslexic.org/about]. Very little problems with monospace, even at 6-10px
No, that was a humorous email purporting to cite "rscheearch" that never existed. People cannot read easily when the internal letters of a word are scrambled; the "scrambling" performed in the email intentionally leaves most of the structure of the word in place.
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/word...
Scrambling the internal letters leads to much greater difficulty.
The link notes this explicitly:
> This study only looked at letter transpositions of a single position, like the kinds used in the original hoax. I can only speculate how dramatically reading speed would be hurt with more dramatic transpositions
I'd also like to take this opportunity to voice a couple of common complaints I have when people name things.
1. Please don't use words that written like acronyms but are designed to be read as an English word, for example NGINX (web server) and SPDY (HTTP/2 precursor). They are hard to parse because they're seemingly random letters and even harder for many of use to guess how they should be pronounced.
2. Closely related to point 1, but please don't drop letters from English words or even replace letters with other letters that is roughly pronounced the same. Imgur exhibits both these problems and it was years before I grokked how to pronounce that site.
I get naming things is hard, even harder as all the catchy names for things get snapped up, but the trend of having misspelt words as a way of acquiring shorter domain names hurts anyone who struggles with English (as I'd imagine this would be as true for any non-native English speakers as it is for those who's first language is English but suffer with reading difficulties).
Also, NGINX is pronounced "engine X".
It absolutely is, but my first interpretation of that word was more like "n-jinks".
I mean, I understand that it's meant as "n-gin-x", but glommed together that still seems like an unnatural way to pronounce that word to me.
For what it's worth I am a native English speaker (and I assume nginx creator Igor Sysoev isn't), but maybe that's just me.
I don't know if the "Sequel" pronunciation is a recent thing (relatively speaking to the age of the language itself) but it's only been the latter half of my career that I've heard people favouring that over "S-Q-L". In fact "Sequel" really threw me at first.
I remember failing a telephone interview once because I didn't know what `chmod 777` did. However I've always known it as "chi-mod" and the interviewer phrased the question as "What is C-H-M-O-D 7-7-7" so I started thinking it was an ISO / ANSI type standard I hadn't heard of and didn't make the connection it was a UNIX command. I remember being rather pissed off about that considering, at that time, I'd had > 10 years of UNIX systems administration so was intimately familiar with `chmod`.
* I've always assumed the conventional way to pronounce `chmod` was something like "ch-mod" (i.e., "chŭ-mod", with a short u). Is that less common than I think?
* `char` (like the C-style character variable type) is an interesting example. I've always read it as - and usually heard it as - "car". But there are groups where "char" (like the word meaning "burn") is more common. Strangely no one seems to say "care", which would be the corresponding part of the root word "character", right?
* "JSON" is another curious one. I've always just read that as "Jason" (like the name) but others seem to emphatically drop the missing "A", saying it more like "j-SON".
* For that matter, I've always read `fsck` like "f-seek", but apparently the creators intended it as "fisk".
Is there some kind of ethnographic study on this topic? Surely there are identifiable communities of these, but I've never been able to discern the broader pattern. I'm guessing it was once relatively regional, but it's probably more broadly distributed (and maybe domain/community-based) in the post-YouTube/podcast era.
>With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It barely slows me down at all. Studies have shown that most people can read fairly easily when the first and last letters of a word are fixed and the inner letters are scrambled. Given the difficulty that dyslexics have, I suspect this isn't a realistic simulation.
That's only true when you've already reached a high level of fluency and are used to reading fast. You need to have a deep "predictive" knowledge of the language as well as a photographic memory of the shape of the words. That works well for literate native speakers but that wouldn't work well at all for a learner of the language, even at an intermediate level.
Since dyslexics have a hard time learning to read correctly, it's possible that they struggle to reach that level of fluency where you can just skim through text without paying attention to the small details of the spelling.
That's pure guesswork on my part though.
When I hit a long word I didn't already know/expect I was lost, on "letters" I was stuck because it looked like a noun beginning "I" (poor don't choice), even "reading" have me pause because the kerning made "rn" appear as "m".
Imagine trying to learn to read like that, unpossible!
I did too, at first. But with the longer words it was impossible unless you already knew the word, like typoglycemia (a word I didn't already know).
For example, I have the visual type and can listen to content at 350 to 450 words per min depending on what I'm reading. Many people with auditory dyslexia can speed read visually.
On of the most famous common threads between the two is that learning to read the traditional way takes longer for people with Dyslexia if you have auditory, visual or a combination of the two. It's common for people with Auditory dyslexia to also have speech problems as kiddos.
For me personally, I have no problem with letters. A "b" is never a "d" or whatever stereotypical explanations you might hear about dyslexia. My problem is with entire words. I will often substitute one word for another while reading (and writing). I can go back and might still read that incorrect word. But I don't think I ever really "see" that incorrect word. It is more that my brain is lazy and isn't actually reading, it is just assuming what is supposed to be there and that assumption is occasionally wrong.
An algorithmic analogy I would use would be fuzzy matching. Most people's brains are set to look for exact matches (or fuzzy matching with a super high match criteria). When one part of their brain needs access to a word, the other part of their brain will supply the exact match. My brain is using fuzzy matching with the confidence level set mistakenly low. When part of my brain needs a word, the first match returned is occasionally a false positive match. The rest of my brain just accepts it and continues onto the next requested word. The match quality isn't a traditionally fuzzy matching algorithm like Levenshtein distance. It is heavily weighted to both the start of the word and the expectedness of the word in the given context. The latter makes it very difficult for me to immediately notice my own written mistakes since I am already primed to expect what I intended to write and not necessarily what I actually wrote.
I seem to be able to break the spell in a number of ways. When I'm re-reading a final draft of something (say an important email) I will try to eliminate context and deliberately read each word individually. Another way to break this spell is to read a document much later in time. Sometimes the pattern matching self-corrects later, or seemingly I have forgotten the verbatim phrasing of the idea that I previously wrote, and so upon reading I pick up the mistake.
I read thousands of words per day, probably write well into the hundreds. Fortunately, the amount of errors for me is very low, but if this were to happen with increased frequency, reading and writing would be quite stressful.
As a kid, reading aloud in class was always nerve wracking because of this. The game was to do these double-takes so quickly that nobody could tell you were doing all of this extra work. Often you read ahead of what you're saying so that you can double-take before saying the word.
Yup, reading out loud was the absolute worst. I have different issues though, and because of my reading's tight associations with speech(1), I couldn't even read ahead. I think my "only-when-read-out-loud" stutter comes from the social anxiety I developed here.
(1) i.e. To read words with my eyes, I have to mentally speak them to myself.
It's not just your brain. It's how vision works in general. Everyone has physical blind spot (where the optic nerve attackhes to the retina) but no one can see it except if they carefully hunt hor it. Everyone can see high resolution only in a tiny area at the center of the visual field, and imagines the rest.
With dyslexia (and various physical vision problems), you're collecting even less input (due to misprocessing at some "lower layers"), so your higher-level recognition/comprehension brain has to fill in more missing deails, and so has a higher error rate.
Largely due to research out of Yale, there is an entrenched belief among many dyslexia experts that dyslexia is not experienced visually, but is rather a phonological condition. However, if you ask 10 people with dyslexia whether their condition has a visual component, you will get at least 4 people (and quite likely more) who say yes.
Websites like this reinforce the understanding that dyslexia does – at least for some people — have a visual component. Fortunately, the international community seems to be less allegiant to the Yale research.
They view dyslexia as a set of conditions that can be more visual for some and more phonological for others. And there are also many practitioners (assistive technologists, occupational therapists, tutors) in the US who share this broader view of dyslexia.
But it remains baffling to me that so many of the "experts" in the US are unwilling to listen to actual people with dyslexia who state in no uncertain terms that they experience dyslexia in a visual way.
The reason this has come up as a frustration for me (as someone who works in the field but does not have dyslexia) is that my startup's technology is visual in nature. The tech I built [1] has become quite popular among people with dyslexia — despite not having been created with this audience in mind.
I always assumed that experts/advocates would be happy to have another tool that could help people with dyslexia. I never imagined that there could be such a strong orthodoxy of "dyslexia isn't visual, it's phonological" could exist. This website, and the comments in this thread, provide damning proof to the contrary.
However I do find tools like yours very useful, it makes reading much easier for me. It definitely helps with line transitions, which I do have slight difficulty with, but isn’t the primary cause of reading comprehension issues for me. Instead most reading comprehension issues are my brain simply ignoring or replacing words completely without me realising.
If true that would certainly suggest a visual component, no?
As you say though, I would be surprised if the root cause was the same for every individual.
From the research I have seen - nobody is saying it isn’t experienced visually, they are stating that it isn’t a problem stemming from the visual systems - there is a huge difference.
But I think your disagreement with Yale is a spat of semantics. (It doesn't help that Yale seems confused about what "phonology" means, as they seem to blur its modern meaning of "linguistics at the scale smaller than words" with the old meaning of "letter sounds" -- perhaps they go too far in "dumbing down" the language for the general public audience). Is it hard to track sentences across linebreaks? Sure. Is that dyslexia? It's also hard to read when you are extremely farsighted or have very low light vision.
It seems clear to me that there's a visual component of reading paragraphs, and then Beeline can help with that.
But that's a bit different from difficulty reading letters and words. Do you have research on how Beeline (or other visual theories) affect single-word or single-line reading?
I understand your frustration, though. The education and medical establishment have trouble with complexity and overlapping phenomena and spectral disorders. We see the same thing nowadays where "autism" has lot nearly all its meaning, having grown to include anyone with any basket of symptoms, even people with easily identifiable chromosomal disorders. This happens because institutions needs single term to describe their entire educational/research program, because insurance only pays for treatment for certain blessed disorders, and because lay people need a way to communicate with other and share resources.
(BTW, it's confusing that the demo control buttons are so far from the text they affect. It took me a while to realize that the site wasn't broken.)
Thanks also for the feedback on the demo control buttons on the BeeLine website. It was closer previously but then we redesigned things and it floated up to the top. Useful to know that we've taken a step backwards in some regards...
It’s true that the digits did jump around on me, but it’s not experienced as active motion, as portrayed here. It’s more that I see a false representation of what’s in the page.
I think words aren’t an issue because my brain is good enough at picking the word from what’s there and context.
It would be more like rendering the page with a few different Random letters swapped each time, rather than continuous movement of letters on the page.
Part of the reason I got into programming is that I kept mixing up numbers in high school in the show-your-work phase that led me to the wrong answer saved by partial credit. I built programs on my TI-86 that would output each step of that phase and would meticulously write things down number by number.
This website isn't accurate for me per say...but I guess it does capture the "hazy" feeling when I read.
I do believe us dyslexics have significantly different brains. I get along with dyslexics more than neurotypicals. We seem to have a strange bond. I suppose we're more "abstract" thinkers...in the sense that we are used to reasoning about spaces instead of particular instances...owing to the probabilistic nature of our minds...but maybe I'm using the wrong language here.
Dysgraphia, and (the often accompanying) ADD, are part of why I initially got into computers. I would type much much more easily than I could write, so I would beg teachers to let me type assignments instead of writing by hand, which was significantly less common when I was young than it is today. In retrospect, it's a good part of how I ended up working in technology.
Unfortunately it has, I think, also hampered my career. It makes it, as you can imagine, significantly more difficult to whiteboard. My whiteboarding either looks like something a child would produce, or requires immense focus (often both), completely separate from the engineering consideration, to produce what seems simple for most people.
Inconspicuous disabilities are such a strange thing to live with. They're not evident, so I think it's difficult for people to relate to them. I really appreciate the effort that was put into making the linked site and I hope it makes it easier for people to understand the struggles some people deal with without most other people ever noticing.
As already was mentioned, there is a wide range of ways this can express itself. I have something called "phonological processing deficits" [1], which means that letters which sound similar k/g, d/t, b/p are hard to distinguishes for me. In reading this is not much of a problem, in writing it I have extra attention. In recent times I notices that I recognize misspelled words not on the letters/sounds involved, but rather on the overall shape/silhouette of the word, meaning the up and down of the letters.
The letters are like 98% in the correct state, but contain small components of other letters, giving a breathing/morphing effect like what you would see on shrooms.
It starts off with the history of writing, which I actually have to go back and re-read because it's such a crazy evolution. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants. I can't imagine getting thrown back into the stone age and having to figure out a way to communicate ideas.
It also talks about the fascinating ways that the brain uses different modalities to converge on meaning - really made me thought a lot about machine learning algorithms. It refers to a lot of well-designed studies with results that provide valuable insights into the inner workings of the brain.
It also talks a lot about dyslexia and how it is a rather broadly defined disorder. I'm pretty sure I could be considered dyslexic based simply on how poor of a reader I am. This also, however, could explain why I did better with math and science where you are doing yourself a great disservice to trying to skim the texts. I read that shit at the pace of a snail, but hey, maybe that allowed me to process the concepts better.
This is particularly frustrating when viewing GCP or AWS support docs. I get the lack of accessibility on marketing oriented sites but support docs for major could providers should render coherently with an alternative font!
Edit: Should've googled first, there seems to be plenty of extensions that solve exactly this issue.
Here is a screenshot of what it looks like with the OpenDyslexic typeface https://gist.github.com/rudolph9/e4e86fee61cccd722f6b56eb841...
Here's how you could do it on your own, this is for the google cloud docs reference https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/apis.
Note you have to allow pages to set their own fonts in firefox if you use this option
0. Open up your console in dev-tools (F12).
1. Load Jquery (Give it a second, let the script load)
var jq = document.createElement('script');
jq.src = "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js";
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);
fontSets = new Set();
$('*').each( function() {
fontSets.add( $(this).css("font-family"))
});
console.log(fontSets)
Set(7) [
"Roboto, Noto Sans, Noto Sans JP, Noto Sans KR, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Thai, Noto Sans Hebrew, Noto Sans Bengali, sans-serif",
"\"Material Icons\"",
"Google Sans, Noto Sans, Noto Sans JP, Noto Sans KR, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Thai, Noto Sans Hebrew, Noto Sans Bengali, sans-serif",
"Roboto, RobotoDraft, Arial, sans-serif",
"Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif",
"Google Sans, Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif",
"Material Icons"]
$('*').each( function() {
if ( $(this).css("font-family").indexOf("Material Icons") === -1)
$(this).css("font-family",`OpenDyslexic, ${$(this).css("font-family")}`);
});I highly recommend that you skim through the other thread. I found, as someone who deals with kids with dyslexia, that the insights helped me better understand and deal with them.
Also, understanding the different types of dyslexia helped me organize some contradictions I had heard.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226676 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677
I implemented this particular vizualisation into Polypane so you can run it on any website and from what I experienced with people with dyslexia, there are definitely people that don't see a difference between this on or off.
https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/03/devtools?u...
So maybe your designers with their tiny thin fonts can learn some compassion for us poor sighted folk.
Oh wait. That’s Twitter.
Please feel free to share :D
https://dept.wofford.edu/neuroscience/neuroseminar/pdfspring...
https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/12/12/dyslexia-and-autis...
What else can web developers and/or content writers do to make content better readable or more easier to comprehend (even if it’s by easy guessing)?
I think the reason these fonts are popular with some people with dyslexia is that they are heavier (thicker lines) and have more space between characters. For some people, including people with visual impairments, these features make reading easier. This is especially the case if the alternative is some super-thin font that is dark grey, against a light grey background.
I've seen discussions in the WCAG (web accessibility) community and other community around how to make reading easier for neurodiverse populations. Unfortunately, most of what I've seen has been along the lines of "don't use big words" and "use short/simple sentences". While this is all well and good for some uses cases, it is not practical advice if your app is an ebook reader or your website talks about complex financial instruments.
Fortunately, there are some layout-related things that you can do to make text more inclusively designed, and you can check out the Center for Applied Special Technologies' website for an interactive demo. [1] Full disclosure, one of the technologies they feature was created by my startup, BeeLine Reader. Let me know if you want to try out our JS on your site — contact info is in my profile.
PS: the commercial font you reference is "Dyslexie", not "Dyslexia". A common typo, I'm sure!
My partner said the visual experience from this video[1] is close to what she experiences when trying to read text.
Not unfair, but you've had a lifetime of non-dyslexic reading to perfect this skill.
It may be exaggerated, but I found it interesting to see the difficulties that dyslexics have to put up with. I really empathise with children trying to learn to read with this condition.
I can understand that learning to read with dyslexia is super frustrating... This is a great way to make people understand what dyslexia feels like.
It would be amazing if we had something like that to understand what it’s like to be black in America...
1. How vastly differently we experience the world 2. How little our experience resembles what there actually is outside.
That brain of ours seems to be a real little f*cker what comes to creating an illusion that we observe some kind of objective reality. I need to keep that in mind.
I can easily spot that I spelled a word wrong, but can't necessary spell.
I been remedying this through anki and spaced repetition, but it's a slow process and my mind sometime switch to incorrect spellings anyway.
My problem with numbers is that they add themselves together and move around.
So I might see something like:
- 22
- 376
- 4021
As:
- 242
- 367
- 4022
Which makes things like long division impossible or writing out my credit card number in an online checkout take 5-10 minutes
At least for me, having 2 sources of information greatly increases the degree of comprehension and reduces eye fatigue.
I'm 35, is there anything to fix that?
I feel kinda bad about it, because I'm a professional writer.
I just tried this while reading your comment and... I just can't xD
I'm even listening to music in the background, but my brain just blocks that out the moment I start reading.
What is that missing word?
On the other side, I suffer from migraines (the ones that give you auras and take you out for days), and the visualisation of the letters changing is exactly how words look when I try and read text during my aura phase. I am going to have to borrow this site to explain to my doctor what I see here, as this is probably the most accurate representation of the effect I have seen. (TL;DR: Thank you!)
Now I need to look away, because the effect is causing my vision to go a little funny! :)
The funny thing is, sometimes, I would still be perfectly capable of reading. I didn't see the text, or at least didn't perceive it, but apparently it still reached the parts of my brain responsible for interpreting writing.
If I remember correctly, there's even some people who have this as a permanent condition, that is, are completely blind but can still read text even though they don't even see it.
It's quite weird, honestly, and if it hadn't been for the fear of actual migraine that would follow the aura distracting me, I imagine the experience itself would have been quite uncomfortable on its own.
Another interesting effect was that in the days after a strong migraine, my vision would stay messed up and start to get weirdly distorted whenever I tried reading something, which might be quite similar to what dyslexia feels like, at least for those cases where it's more on the visual side.
I've always found all of this incredibly fascinating, as it goes to show just how complex the human brain is and how it can malfunction and react to internal and external influences.