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Comment by smokey_the_bear | Hacker News Reader

My 11 year old daughter uses the open dyslexic font in her kindle. She has dyslexia, and also had to do some vision therapy when she was younger. She thinks she is able to read for longer with fewer headaches. She specifically has trouble tracking line to line.

She finds it very challenging to read her school textbooks, which are provided online on her Chromebook with a bad screen. I bought her paper versions of the same books.

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I don’t have dyslexia, that I’m aware of, but have always had trouble tracking line to line, and end up having to reread a lot. I do have AuDHD, so that’s probably part of it. During the pandemic I took a course to improve my reading speed as something to do. One of the techniques was to use a tracer, either a finger or pen, to keep track of where you’re at and move it at the pace of the reading. As a kid I always thought kids who did this were worse at reading, so I never wanted to do it, but is immensely helpful and probably had the biggest impact of all the techniques when it came to improving my reading. I also found that one of the reasons I got distracted and bored while reading was how slow I was. As I sped up, I was able to better engage with a story (for fiction reading).

This was taught by default in my elementary school. I found it frustrating, though, because I don't actually read a word at a time. I've always processed blocks of text, a few lines together. I can read one word at a time if someone needs me to for some reason, but I don't do it by default.

When I was young, I thought it was so strange that they would slow people down like this. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized the way my brain flipped the "on" switch for reading was different from how most people read.

I'll take in several words at a time, but the finger/pen help my eyes stay on course and the pace I move my hand helps keeps the speed where I want it. It generally isn't hitting every word, sometimes just moving down the page, or back and forth in the center 60% of the page. This is in contrast to someone who is just learning who may point at each word while they sound it out.

One of the things talked about in a lot of speed reading circles is subvocalization, and not doing it. I assume if you're taking in several lines at a time you're not reading to yourself in your head and just seeing the words and understand them. I've tried this, but find it difficult and feel like my comprehension goes down. It also takes a lot of effort to actively change how my brain handles processing text, so I get tired of it rather quickly.

Yeah, my reading story is apparently really odd. Didn't realize that until I was much older.

My mom read to me a lot when I was really little, pointing at the words as she read them, and as she tells it, one day when I was 3 I just told her it was my turn and I read books to her. She figured maybe I'd memorized a couple favorites, but on our next trip to the library, she found out some switch had flipped in my head and I was now "a reader."

Neither of my parents had younger siblings or cousins around and I was their first, and apparently they didn't remember their own childhood reading learning very well, so, "Oh, I guess she reads now," was as far as they looked into it until my preschool teachers were very surprised when I started the next year.

I don't really have any explanation for it other than "when I see words, I know what they mean," so unfortunately I don't think it's particularly helpful or generalizable. Just a quirk I guess.

I don't have dyslexia, but I find it much, much more difficult to read on a screen. I think it's partly the eye strain, and partly the opportunity cost of "this device could be doing something more exciting right now".

I prefer to read on screen if it can set to “night mode” (white-on-black), large font, and full screen. For one, I find it’s more ergonomic to look at a well-positioned monitor than bending my neck to read a book.

That is due most likely because you are using bad screens and/or bad fonts.

Any computer monitor with a resolution less than 4k renders text with a much worse quality than printed paper. Smaller resolutions may be perfectly adequate for movies and games, but they are not good enough for reading long texts, e.g. books.

Something like a 27 inch or 32 inch 4k monitor is acceptable for reading text. It is still not quite as good as printed paper, but the price of better monitors increases very quickly. At such sizes a 5k monitor would be needed for good text rendering, but those are much more expensive.

You normally sit at a longer distance from a monitor than from a book, so the dot-per-inch resolution of the monitor should be configured so that a page of text should have greater dimensions on the screen than when printed. For instance, for my 27 inch 4k monitor I configure a 216 dots-per-inch value, which results in an on-screen size about 4/3 bigger than on paper, e.g. for an A4 page. I also do not use the default OS fonts, but I replace them with better fonts. Some bad graphic environments may provide no access or only a hidden access to configuring directly the DPI value of the monitor, which is the right way for scaling what is displayed, and they provide only settings that may result in low-quality text rendering, e.g. a multiplier for the size of the fonts or of the windows.

With a good monitor and with well-configured appearance settings in the OS, I prefer very much to read books on the computer display, instead from physical books.

I believe (no evidence) that printed text is easier to read because of the mono spaced serif fonts used.

The serifs are visual cue to lead the eyes onto the next letter or word.

I don't think you mean "monospaced". Monospaced fonts (where every character cell has the same width, like an old typewriter) are almost never used for normal text in Latin scripts.

Thanks for the correction. I was thinking of proportional spacing.

I don't have dyslexia, but I think reading apps could help with all this stuff, and it would help others too.

Basically allowing advanced typography could help so many people with visual problems.

for example, allow adjustment of:

- spacing between characters

- spacing between words

- spacing between lines (giant spaces might help you)

- sizes of margins/gutters (whitespace that defines column width/height)

- more character color and background choices (night mode helps me)

- your own fonts

When amazon stopped allowing download of kindle books, I couldn't convert to epub and my reading took a nosedive. I use the kindle app for reading now and it is very limited in adjustability which makes reading harder for me.

> I bought her paper versions of the same books.

Then e-ink screen would provide the same benefits ie: contrast.

I could not figure out a way to extract a pdf of the textbook to send to her kindle. I would have liked that solution, since she has one of the large format kindles.

I used to have PDFs on my Kindle, you used to be able to email them to your Kindle, I think Amazon killed that functionality, I believe you can plug it to your computer and mount it and drop in the PDFs but I don't know if it needs to be in a specific directory, just be weary of image heavy PDFs they may not load at all.

I do know how to load arbitrary PDFs onto the kindle, you can do it now with a specific email address that's assigned to each kindle. It's allow-listed for coming from your amazon email address though.

I was not able to extract the PDF from the online textbook. I think I had something that would have worked to just get the content, but I'd have had to stitch all the chapters back together, and if the page numbers didn't match the original book it would have been a hassle for my daughter.

Definition could be a bigger thing.

I used my son's HP Chromebook for about a year as a third device, and the screen was indeed pretty bad for reading.

Tuning brightness, colors and bumping font sizes helped; but at the end of the day it's a very low DPI screen and intricate letter shapes are that more blurry at the sizes that were easier for me to read.

I have no trouble reading all day on a Surface Pro, for comparison.

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