Comment by kafkaesque | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kafkaesque | Hacker News Reader

I was born with pretty severe strabismus and underwent a few major eye surgeries throughout my life.

One of the side effects of being born with this condition is missing lines when reading a book. Growing up with computers, I always found it a little difficult to follow long lines of text or the next line as I scroll.

I'm a lot older now and hardly have these problems, if ever at all. I've pretty much perfected guessing varying levels of depth perception, I guess, as this effects my stereoscopic vision. I'm not sure what goes on at the neurological level or 'lower level', however.

Anyway, you don't know how natural it felt to read this. It almost worked too well, so I would like to test it out a little more before, just because I'm a natural sceptic.

Regardless, kudos on this great work and creative thinking.

And yes, it almost did feel like words 'moved' a little sometimes when I was a child and was still developing strong optic/extraocular muscles. It is difficult to explain/articulate, especially since it happened such a long time ago and I'm working from memory, though.

Okay, so I played with this for a few more minutes and this is my feedback:

I think this would be great for children with reading issues. It would be great as a 'feature' that can be turned on or off on an operating system (on the desktop, tablet, or smartphone). It feels almost like 'training wheels', and as such, I think it'd be great.

However, I do now realise that the line underlining the text can be distracting for someone who no longer has trouble following from one line to the next. Also, it is too easy for children to use this as a crutch, and may actually hinder muscle improvement if used for too long.

Also, like I said, I don't really have reading issues anymore, but I can see how this could've helped me when I was a kid. I definitely would be interested in reading the results of this tested on kids. As another person said below, my primary schoolteacher also suggested we use a paper to block out the bottom text when reading line by line, and this did help, but I think I was very self-conscious to actually do it all the time.

You're on to something!

Edit: Added clarification.

I also have strabismus and have undergone some surgery, but I don't find that this helps much. Specifically, my eyes keep jumping below the line which separates the new text from the old. I'd like to see a version where as soon as you start scrolling, the previous page is replaced by background and the new page appears line by line.

Try this:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/lca...

It color codes lines aiming to solve missing or loosing your place while reading.

Thanks! I gave it a quick whirl and couldn't get it working on websites. It never captured the proper text (e.g., on latimes.com).

I'll try it out tonight.

It was hastily written for a 24hr hackathon so yea it can be improved. It finds the largest block of text on the page and assumes that's the important content. If the comments section is larger than the article text, the extension incorrectly uses the comments.

If you find it helps your reading please email me and I'll take time to improve and fix it.

Admittedly, I didn't try it in any real world setting, but my gut reaction was horror. Even reading through the example paragraph, I did not find the gradients as useful landmarks.

But it does make me wonder if other forms of spatial landmarks could be employed in large paragraph text. Perhaps enlarge the start of each, if only for a couple of words, in a way that quickly tappers back to the normal text height. Extreme run-on sentences might require subclauses to be highlighted similarly. Line spacing should accommodate the extra needed height, but remain regular, making the whole document appear double spaced.

At least, that is the picture in my head. It might not do any better than this Beeline reader.

+1. The gradient just makes the page look confusing, and my eyes gained none of the imagined advantage of "you were just looking at red, so look for red... look for red... there's the next line!"

I might actually like it better if it just colored one line red, the next line blue, and so on. Absolute positioning instead of all this clever gradient stuff.

I am strabismic too, but don't have problems with reading text. In fact, while strabismus affects 3d perception, i don't see how scrolling and reading are affected unless one has double vision.

Cool.

Not everyone with strabismus has the same symptoms, right? It depends on many factors, as I'm sure you know, which is why I tried to give a bit more info on myself. When I had my third eye surgery (due to my strabismic eyes) around 1995, they told me reading from line to line would be harder at first. And they were right. At this point, though, they had gone into my eyes before I was 5 twice and had cut and then 'reconnected' some nerves. Only my third time was laser. As you may know, knowledge of the causes of this eye problem, especially in the 80s, was pretty minimal. I remember feeling like a guinea pig because they would contradict each other sometimes and say one thing then say they don't fully understand this condition and would have to try different things. And then the "Well, you can try it".

What I'm saying is, it's not as clear cut. It's always interesting for me to read others's experience with strabismus, though.

Another strabismic person weighing in ;) (Is that even the right word? People just call me cross-eyed...)

I had eye surgerie(s?) when I was very young and don't really remember them. They probably helped, but I've avoided further surgery due to the "guinea pig" impression you describe, and the fact that I don't feel like my vision is severely inhibited. My depth perception is probably worse than that of other people, but I've never known better (and I think my brain has learned to compensate using a strategy skewed toward motion parallax instead of stereopsis).

Anyway, this scrolling method is unreadable to me, for whatever that's worth.

Ah! Hey, I'm willing to agree that it might just be my googly-eyes that this works for :)

This question is for all of you with strabismic (yes, it is a word :D) eyes: Do you 'see' 3D movies? Or are all of them flat with red, blue and various outlines on the screen? For me, it's the latter. Now I have no idea if this has to do with this condition or is something else!

I have strabismus and I can see 3d movies if it's the old kind with the red and blue tinted glasses. For the new ones I can't see the 3d, it just looks like the normal 2d but darker.

strabismic here. Never had surgery. As far as I can tell my brain gave up on merging the vision in my eyes and only uses one at a time. Last time I tried 3d glasses was when they were red and blue. The image kinda strobes between red and blue.

Strabismic people that do not correct the problem before ~8 years old do not have 3d perception using binocular disparity (that is,estimating depth in short distances using only the differences between the images of the two eyes). For me (never had surgery), I cannot see 3d dot stereograms or 3d movies (I ve never actually watched a 3d movie, but I have tried seeing blue/white 3d images in vain).

There are other ways to perceive 3d, such as motion parallax, so yes, we are normal people too :)

That's the reason i am not excited about 3d movies and hope they keep making 2d versions of them

I can't see the 3d effects - it all looks 2d - but neither do I see red and blue lines or the like.

I abhor 3d movies. The old style (with red and blue lenses) would cause me to alternate between flat red or blue images. The new sort just look like dark 2d--if I concentrate very hard I can occasionally notice certain "3d" effects but I'm certainly not getting the same experience as everyone else.

For me, I ve never had surgery which is why I never had eye movement problems as you describe. Surgery involves shortening (cutting) the muscles that rotate the eye, which requires a period of readjustment.

Reading text in books requires quick eye jumps (saccades). Now, with smooth scrolling, we add to that the need to do smooth pursuit movements , trying to follow the scrolling text. For me, the biggest problem is figuring out where to continue reading after scrolling when the smooth pursuit ends (probably because smooth pursuit has higher margin of error). I think it would really be helpful is there was a line indicating the previous page boundary on screen when changing pages.

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