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Comment by larrymcp | Hacker News Reader

I tried this in a few different browsers but the pages weren't rendered in that font as the site indicates. Instead it seems to be rendered in Comic Sans.

Wonder if there's something I'm doing wrong.

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There's a cross-origin issue with the webfonts.

https://opendyslexic.org/ without the "www" works better.

Oh wow, this looks way different. I honestly liked the previous version more to be honest: I guess it was Verdana or similar on my mobile phone.

Granted that I'm not dyslexic: this version seems way more difficult to read, other than looking bad :(

The thing is it kinda forces me to read the text word by word and makes it much easier to correctly read the words.

I'm very minimal reading dyslexic (it's a bit complex).

Anyway while it doesn't fell like it would allow me to read faster, I believe it does help me to read more correct. Through I have to test it out more. I thing I will try it the next time I write a paper or similar. Also it's very different to many other font's so maybe it's just about getting used to it?

One thing I noticed quickly is it allows me to see the words as words instead of a string of text. Without the font i have to focus on each word.

I'll have to try this out.

Multiple people here find the font makes them read slower, but in my case I think I even read slightly faster, or at least not slower at all.

I think it's great to read, but agree that it isn't the best-looking font. Not as bad as comic sans though.

This is probably due to the fact that when we usually read, we just perform some kind of "pattern recognition" without even thinking about it: we just look at the first letters and the last ones, and our brain makes up the word as we read it [0].

Probably this font forces us to read letter by letter, and this is what makes it easier for dyslexic people to read the text (they don't get confused too much of the next / previous characters), and so difficult for people who aren't used to read letter by letter.

Interesting :)

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typoglycemia

Thanks, fixed it.

Thanks - that works for me. For a moment I thought Comic Sans was an ahead-of-its-time work of genius.

Comic Sans actually is a very readable font but it wasn't specifically designed to help those with dyslexia.

Hilariously, Chrome now hides the www from you, so if you look at it, it doesn't seem like you're on www.

I was actually wondering if the font really looked similar to comic sans intentionally. I was already thinking "might that be a reason to why it's unconciously used a lot?"

people generally claim that Comic Sans is helpful for dyslexia - I think that is the default view (for anyone who considers accessibility of the font, most people just hate on it ) https://www.arcstone.com/blog/designing-for-accessibility-dy... however there have been some recent arguments that the studies as to if it was actually helpful for accessibility are dubious https://www.tes.com/news/does-comic-sans-help-dyslexic-learn...

The it's dubious argument seems compelling but I still tend towards the it helps belief probably just because I have spent some time thinking the first argument was true and the second argument has not yet managed to win through that habit.

I also wondered if the Comic Sans was some sort of elaborate joke...

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