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Comment by skyde | Hacker News Reader

how about this? https://imgur.com/a/fdbfZ2m

this is a quick experiment I did to apply color highlights to english book the same way we do it with programming language in IDE.

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I also find that much harder to read :) For me the colour distracts from the text because I tend to look for colour to carry a separate meaning (separate from the letters itself). So every letter that stands out my brain is searching for that extra meaning. And the split vowels are harder too, but probably just because I'm not used to them.

However I'm not dyslexic! I don't really know how that works. You should test it with them, perhaps it would really benefit them.

the color do carry a separate meaning. Each group of letter is a digraph and make one of the 44 english sounds.

if you didn’t know that it’s because your old enough to have learn to read using « sight word/ whole word» method. instead of using the new « phonics » method.

This is also probably why it make it harder for you to read it. Because your brain is not trying to recognize syllable or sound but instead to recognize each word as a whole unit.

To add another data point. This is much harder to read for me compared to the non-coloured text. However, I am not dyslectic. The colour is distracting, my mind is trying to figure out what those colours mean, and how it should interpret them. Thinking about that, maybe it gets better with time. My mind would figure out those colours and use that information to read faster.

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