Hacker News Reader

Favourite fact of the moment : illiterate humans built the walls of jericho as it was built 2,000 years before writing was invented.

Text is a jet fuel for humanity, not a requirement for success. I am only saddened that "we" have let down those 800M by not giving them a basic education

View on HN

I know someone with very bad dyslexia and it's not that he didn't get a basic education, it's that he can't understand written text or menu items more than one layer deep. He calls if wants to communicate which is very endearing but I also have major misgivings with modern UI paradigms. The "three dashed lines" that you see everywhere are infuriating.

Do visual icons like the three lines for a menu help or hurt the usability of an application for people with dyslexia?

I had assumed iconography was a boon for illiterate people- thinking primarily of symbols on shop signs or a striped barbers pole, for example.

> Do visual icons like the three lines

They hurt usability even for people perfectly capable of reading. Especially when Material fanboy fill everything with whitespace and bans black for the text.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com