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Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an exaggeration of the descriptions I've heard about dyslexia, in that letters move way too far. Another huge problem is that the first and last letters don't change, and I'm betting that for dyslexics, those anchor letters don't exist. 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.

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.

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I’m dyslexic, you’re right, this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost impossible to simulate the real thing. It’s not like the letters move around the page, it’s that you perceive them to be other letters or words. Then you realize that you read doesn’t make sense and your brain just replaces it with the correct words or letters when you read it again. It kind of makes you aware of the fact that what you see and what is there are two distinct things which are not always the same.

That certainly explains why some dyslexic people seem to be decent at reading but not at spelling. If there's no static truth to the perceived spelling, even to the author, it's got to be nearly impossible to reliably spell.

I am dyslexic and this is very true to me. I can read perfectly fine, although I may re-read a word occasionally, or highlight the page as I read to track where I am (A tick I was taught in school to help).

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.

I am 100% the same. I can read fluently, and at a good speed, but I cannot write legibly to save myself. I have such poor fine control with a pen/pencil that I have to hold it in a death-grip and tense my hand and arm muscles to control the letter shapes and even then it feels like the pen/pencil is fighting back. My handwriting is unreadable unless I write in capitals all time. Once I do manage to get the words down on paper, most of the time the words have letters all in the wrong order. It's really frustrating - but at least in these modern times, I rarely have to write anything manually so there's that.

Do you still make mistakes writing by hand if you write with your eyes closed?

Do you have problem with your signature? And can you make it the same every time you sign (like for bank purposes)?

Same here, it is actually how I got into computers, my writing was so bad (I have dysgraphia) that they put me in a special computer lab in the 3rd grade. I am 45 so, that was not a common thing back then. My grades improved and I did well in school, but I am functionally illiterate when it comes to actually hand writing anything. I can tell what something says when I read back something I wrote, but if you where to look at it, well it might as well be hieroglyphs, it is completely illegible to anyone else.

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.

>> it is completely illegible to anyone else.

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.

I find the physical act of writing helps me remember things. There's been research on this that suggests that the processesing you need to do to write something down secures it in your memory better.

That's a cool way to put it. I'm not dyslexic, but I've had this phenomenon happen many times before. The word literally changes in front of you when you reread it. Perception is a powerful tool but far too often we conflate our superimposed visual experience with the reality it samples.

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 think I've experienced this a few times, even though I'm not dyslexic. This happened when I haven't slept for long time and reading something at 4 am gave me that "thoughts out of focus" feeling, when the words are right in front of me, I know I can read them, but experiencing a funny difficulty assembling the letters together. This also happened a couple times on the half-asleep state when I've almost woken up, but still seeing the dream and for a few seconds I had this strange "out of focus" state when focusing attention on words or speech is difficult.

Lack of sleep is one hell of a hallucinogen!

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 :)

So perhaps a closer simulation might be to do some eye tracking, and as one reads to ch age the whole word ?

I have ADHD (where dyslexia is a common co-morbidity). I'm not dyslexic, but I tend to experience dyslexia-like symptoms with numbers. Never letters, just numbers. It made math hell in school. Like you describe, it's not that the numbers are literally moving on the page. It's that they sort of... blob together in my consciousness, like there's a blind spot in my visual understanding, and my brain tends to fill in with numbers that look close enough. I tend to transpose numbers very very easily, swapping 6s and 9s, 2s and 5s, 7s and 1s.

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.

Oh man, so this is an actual problem? I've had this a lot as well, but I only have it with numbers and with multiple choice tests.

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.

Check out Dyscalculia.

That tends to be called dyscalculia and also occurs often with ADHD

I have exactly this, still have a lot of mental math. At school teachers just gave up at some point and gave me a calculator, I still have a lot of trouble with mental multiplication and converting between analog and digital time (doesn't help that in Dutch you say 15:30 like 'half four').

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.

Mental math is so difficult for me that it’s embarrassing! The numbers just don’t stay in my head long enough. I used to feel anxiety if math came up in conversation because I simply can’t calculate in my head like others do, and it makes me feel like a fool.

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.

> Mental math is so difficult for me that it’s embarrassing! The numbers just don’t stay in my head long enough. I used to feel anxiety if math came up in conversation because I simply can’t calculate in my head like others do, and it makes me feel like a fool.

This is a huge problem for me too, but I take solace in the observation that that isn't _math_, that's _arithmetic_.

I don't have any problems with numbers or math. But I do have the same issue with time conversion in Dutch. I also have problems with tens. In Dutch you say "four and sixty" for 64, which I find terribly confusing and I often replace it with 46 internally. I tend to read numbers in English for that reason.

I can relate to this. I was “bad” at math as a child, and was so bored by its basics or at least how they were taught. I never had a good foundation and so never got to takeTrig or Calculus in high school. Later, during my PHD studies, I discovered I was great at set theory, and went on to learn programming. I realized I was never “bad” at math. I was poorly taught. As a result, I had trouble holding numbers in my head to work with them.Now that I am “good” at math, I find this much easier.

I bore/regale/tell/tormwnt everyone I talk with about anything math related, that mathematics and calculation (with numbers) is entirely different abilities. I do this because I've heard so many stories similar to your about people thinking they are bad at math where the only issue turns out to be the digits, numbers, and holding them in you head. Which, quite frankly is not something very relevant to most of mathematics, and as you relate, when you get at ease with the actual math, dealing with numbers usually gets a bit easier.

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.

I have ADD and used to have significant trouble with these kind of issues, while I still have trouble with time, almost all of my issues with remembering number (pin codes etc) went away after an "intensive" regimen of essentially n-back training prescribed by my care provider.

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.

>an "intensive" regimen of essentially n-back training prescribed by my care provider.

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.

This makes me curious if braille would be easier for dyslectics than reading with the eyes.

Wait this is a thing!? I always thought it was just me :O

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

dyscalculia?

It's possible you have Dyscalculia

Tangentially: we humans are wired and trained to read faces and expressions very well.

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’m not dyslexic, but after a poor reaction to general anaesthetic, I had problems with my saccades for a while, and it manifested very much like this. Nothing would hold still, and I’d see stuff in the wrong place.

I wonder if dyslexia is as “simple” as a saccadic deficiency at root...

Edit: well, whaddya know. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9842764/

There are tools that overlay lines over text, or only show a line at a time. Apparently this can help to train your eyes to not dart around during the saccade.

I don't think that's what dyslexia is. It's a flaw at a different level of perception, or else people with dyslexia (like myself) wouldn't have difficulty spelling or keeping left right straight. I can read fine, but spelling is hell.

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.

This sound very similar to reading in dreams. When you read something in a dream multiple times it will change between readings. This is a common technique to detect dreams in order to "start" lucid dreams.

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 have a moderate colour vision deficiency and I sometimes experience something very similar with colours.

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.

Sounds like when I was suffering minor strokes.

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.

Silly question: I recently started learning to read sheet music and I've noticed I have real difficulty counting the number of lines between two notes in the pentagram. If there's just one it's pretty clear, but if they're 2-3 or more it's like my mind can't tell them apart unless I put mi finger on top to obstruct the sight gradually.

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?

This seems pretty normal. I suspect this is similar to reasons why it's hard to read a really wide line of text, or that some people put a sheet of paper under their current line while reading. Something about how our minds can manage smaller groups more easily. Probably related to how telephone numbers split up and why we put commas or spaces in numbers like 1,000,000.

I recently wondered something similar. I "learned" to play music as a child, but could never follow the notes so used to memorize the tune and use the staves as a reference for the timings. Other than with music, my reading has always been above average.

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!

Counting zeros is challenging enough that commas are added to help, so I’d say it’s normal.

For most disorders, a mild case is "normal". People who have more severe cases are classified as "abnormal". (And people who have less severe cases than normal are classified gifted/talented/superpowered.)

I am dyslexic as well, and have the exact experiences you describe. I wonder of a better "simulation" is the random subtle replacement of words in a text with other words, as well as the subtle change of spelling of new or unfamiliar words (e.g., names). Not the best but maybe slightly better.

Not dyslexic, but I understand the symptoms fairly well after doing a couple research papers on it. In order to do a good simulation, I think there would need to be an eye movement sensor involved, so that when the eyes bounced back to a word to re-read it, corrected text could be swapped in. Do you think that would make a better sim?

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 correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?

This happens to me from time to time as well, not in this particular case. I think it's related to the fact that my mind has created a certain context, and I don't read with full attention. I will regularly skip over words unintentionally and "fill in the blanks".

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.

Actually yeah, that sounds a lot better. You're right, if there's no eye movement tracking, people who are not dyslexic would immediately stumble on the text.

I've noticed this happening to me a few times per day. I've noticed it more in the last few months than at any other time in my life...

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?

That does seem abnormal, you should see a doctor.

Serious question; how do you know this is an exaggeration? I would assume you have no way of knowing what this site looks like to non-dyslexics, as you are effectively overlaying real dyslexia on top of simulated. Like looking at a painting of an acid trip while actually on acid, you’d have no idea whether it was representative or not.

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.

Through concentration and compensation skills we've acquired over the years, some dyslexic people can read _almost_ normally. At least, that was the case for me. If I really mentally exert, I can often force myself to read fluidly and read almost as if proficient. The problem is that it is costly to do so and highly conditional.

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.

> 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.

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...

The quote's claim is that they can still be read "fairly easily." The Microsoft link is a study that says ~10% slow down. I think that actually confirms the claim, not debunks it.

The Microsoft link is a study that shows 10% slowdown when reading text in which each word has one or fewer transposition of two adjacent internal letters.

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

This is a bit much, but let me give you a couple of real world examples of names that I've read over and over yet somehow managed to misread every time.

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.

I don't have the general problems with reading, but I do have the problem you mentioned. And I'm also kind of a speed reader, I think the problem is here.

My mother made scrapbooks for my siblings and I with samples of our schoolwork over the years.

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.

Up to a certain age, the S/b/d/p/q issue is considered normal. I certainly did it through early elementary school, and since I have ADHD, I've been screened for dyslexia enough times to be fairly confident I don't have it. All 4 of my kids still did this at the end of first grade, with only one to go on to be diagnosed with dyslexia.

I think flipping and mirroring letters is just using our ability to see that the shapes are the same. You have to do some unlearning in a way, or rather recognizing that rotating a shape changes its meaning.

As sibling comments say, this is a common feature of learning to write that doesn't indicate dyslexia.

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.

Yeah, I think most people don't read words, but recognize their shape, first and last letters being most significant. That's why it is relatively easy to read text with words internally scrambled. Unusual names, long words that are first learned from text, misread once and remembered like that forever. This is especially easy if you don't normally pronounce words while reading.

I still have to double take on "invertebrate", because I originally read it as "intervertebrate" or something like that :).

That's funny. I see that happening with some words or names especially (I can't remember an example I realized the other day).

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 have no idea how accurate this simulation is but this part of your comment made me think:

>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.

I think you're heading in the right direction. Im dyslexic and it definitely took me longer to get to the point that i could read quickly.

I agree but would also add that at least in my experience difficulty with decoding is the root cause where fluency is a symptom.

It's definitely an exaggeration but it's one of the better simulations I've seen for the type of dyslexia I personally have. Though it's worth noting that dyslexia is experienced differently by different people.

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).

I'm a non-native english speaker and, in my case, it doesn't bother me at all, but as I was reading it made me realise that when I see names like those, I just read them in my native language. I've always read imgur like "eem-gur", NGINX as "ngheenx", and SPDY was the only one I quickly spotted the "speedy" lookalike. For the rest I usually just say the letters (I always say S-Q-L and not sequel). I think that not having a native english developer community around me meant that nobody really cared about how you pronounce things.

I always read clang as "C-lang", then heard a LLVM developer said "cling". I feel like if the pronunciation is not obvious, the project should at least specify it somewhere offically.

Also, NGINX is pronounced "engine X".

> 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.

SQL has the opposite problem in that it's legitimately an acronym (Structured Query Language) but is often colloquially pronounced as a word (sequel). However "S-Q-L" (spoken as letters) is technically correct.

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 mentally pronounced chmod as changemod (and changepass, changeroot, changegroup), I guess it was sort of intuitive. Going back to the comment about dyslexia and naming, the unix core utils are probably a good example of "a lot" of abbreviated names that might be difficult to read for people with dyslexia. I wonder if there is a project to automatically create long named aliases for those (list, move, copy, remove...)

Pronunciation of shortened technical jargon is an interesting thing. I've noticed certain common variations but outside of very localized "communities" (like the employees of a particular company) it's not clear to me that there is a particular regional or community pattern for most of them.

* 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.

Really, how much did you read?

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!

You're right, it's harder on very long, unfamiliar words (especially technical terms). I do have to reread some of those, and it slows me down.

I'm dyslexic and I think this is likely less about exaggeration and more about trying to create an experience. In my experience it's not that the letters jump around it's that I can't focus on the words and process them at the same time so I'm constantly jumping from word to word and re-reading. FWIW, visual dyslexia is actually quite a bit less common than auditory.

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.

> With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read

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).

I definitely didn't take it to be a simulation of the mechanics - but a rough feeling of what it's like to be taxed and burdened on something you're used to taking for granted

The longer and more difficult words are, the harder it becomes. Or what does this mean? cmisorepenohn

comprehension

I should note that I've played thousands of Scrabble and Boggle games. My brain may be particularly trained for comprehending this sort of thing. I'm also good at these sorts of word puzzles in general, and have a large vocabulary. So I'm biased in many ways.

First and last letters give me no problems, because they are next the space.

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

I am curious: When you 'zoom' in on a single word and read it letter by letter: Is that still happening?

Not really, but it's hard to keep track of the whole sentence and general meaning by keeping the speed slow.

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

Plus, likely, there is no one dyslexia. There is a wide spectrum from mild to severe. Would be nice to add "hardnesss" slider to the website.

On first read, I noticed that I started reading the words fairly easily but then it started to feel random. I read your comment then went back and it does seem as though if the first and last letters remained the same, I could read the word much easier than if the were scrambled.

Yeah, there's that well known demonstration that shows that it doesn't really matter the order of letters within a word as long as the first and last letters remain the same.

I recall that being debunked. Where the real effect was just “you have two letters that are correct so the corruption of each word is just much lower”

I will debunk your debunk.

When testing on myself (only 1 data point, I know) it actually seemed that having the first letter in the correct position made the biggest difference. So even on long words having first and last letters placed correctly made the biggest difference in readability for me compared to words that had more than 2 letters in the correct position but in the middle.

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]

It really does matter when the words are longer. With short words there’s a limited number of permutations, and letters can’t move far from their real positions. And that demonstration didn’t even attempt to fully scramble the internal letters, it was a rather cherry-picked example. In a language like English with a lot of short words it works better than in others.

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