
Website allows you to experience what it is like to live with dyslexia (2016) - colinprince
http://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea
======
caymanjim
This seems like an exaggeration of the descriptions I've heard about dyslexia,
in that letters move way too far. Another huge problem is that the first and
last letters don't change, and I'm betting that for dyslexics, those anchor
letters don't exist. With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It
barely slows me down at all. Studies have shown that most people can read
fairly easily when the first and last letters of a word are fixed and the
inner letters are scrambled. Given the difficulty that dyslexics have, I
suspect this isn't a realistic simulation.

It's an interesting idea. I appreciate the goal. I just don't know that this
is anything like the real thing. I'm not sure it's possible to know what it's
subjectively like.

~~~
FuckButtons
I’m dyslexic, you’re right, this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost
impossible to simulate the real thing. It’s not like the letters move around
the page, it’s that you perceive them to be other letters or words. Then you
realize that you read doesn’t make sense and your brain just replaces it with
the correct words or letters when you read it again. It kind of makes you
aware of the fact that what you see and what is there are two distinct things
which are not always the same.

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
I have ADHD (where dyslexia is a common co-morbidity). I'm not dyslexic, but I
tend to experience dyslexia-like symptoms with numbers. Never letters, just
numbers. It made math hell in school. Like you describe, it's not that the
numbers are literally moving on the page. It's that they sort of... blob
together in my consciousness, like there's a blind spot in my visual
understanding, and my brain tends to fill in with numbers that look close
enough. I tend to transpose numbers very very easily, swapping 6s and 9s, 2s
and 5s, 7s and 1s.

There's an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with
words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don't
make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there's no easy way for your
brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there's no
equivalent of numbers not making sense.

~~~
polytely
I have exactly this, still have a lot of mental math. At school teachers just
gave up at some point and gave me a calculator, I still have a lot of trouble
with mental multiplication and converting between analog and digital time
(doesn't help that in Dutch you say 15:30 like 'half four').

I'm also terrible at holding numbers in my head, if I do not keep paying
conscious attention to it, they get reversed or substituted. I remember all my
PIN's by the motion you used to input them instead of the number itself.

Programming made me discover how much I love math, but I still miss a lot of
basics because I never 'got it' in elementary school, and thus ended up in the
lowest levels of math in highschool, where it was extremely boring and tedious
(because it was actually way to easy), I wish I could send a programming
book/numberphile videos to my 12-year-old self, because I think I could have
ended up using high-school time way more effectively, instead of just going
through the motions.

~~~
lostmyoldone
I have ADD and used to have significant trouble with these kind of issues,
while I still have trouble with time, almost all of my issues with remembering
number (pin codes etc) went away after an "intensive" regimen of essentially
n-back training prescribed by my care provider.

While my improvement after 30min a day for a couple of weeks was something of
an aberration in magnitude (from 70"th percentile to 110'th, from well below
average to above), it was reportedly quite consistent in increasing recall
percentile with ~10% as measured against the general population. Which
especially at lower percentiles is quite impressive!

It's not really realated, but to me the whole thing was quite a strange
experience! After roughly a week of daily practice, it suddenly felt like I
found a part of my brain I didn't even know existed. I could suddenly pick
numbers, or sequences of "lights" turning on on the screen, seemingly from
nothing! The first times it happened I didn't really remember the sequence, I
only knew which button to push, but after a little more practice I started to
be able to consciously recall the sequence from this new place in my mind.

It was truly stunning to be suddenly able to look at a code at the car wash,
and sometimes remember it for hours afterwards!

Me, who several times had forgotten my card pin, who though I loved and was
good at maths had to read digit by digit to get the numbers right (and often
still didn't), and who had in general tended to permute any kind of number
more often than not for the ~30 years I had known what numbers were!

The brain is so strange sometimes.

~~~
cryoshon
>an "intensive" regimen of essentially n-back training prescribed by my care
provider.

can you describe the treatment protocol to us in brief or link us to
additional resources on this topic? this sounds very interesting and
potentially very helpful.

------
slg
Dyslexic here. Dyslexia is not a single condition. The only way we define
dyslexia is difficulty reading caused by the way the brain processes text so
not something like poor eyesight or low intelligence. Therefore by definition
this is not what a large percentage of dyslexics experience because there is
no common experience. Maybe this is how some dyslexics experience reading, but
I am not one of them and I don't think I have ever actually heard another
dyslexic describe literally seeing letters changing as they look at them. It
is often more that things seem to change when you aren't looking.

For me personally, I have no problem with letters. A "b" is never a "d" or
whatever stereotypical explanations you might hear about dyslexia. My problem
is with entire words. I will often substitute one word for another while
reading (and writing). I can go back and might still read that incorrect word.
But I don't think I ever really "see" that incorrect word. It is more that my
brain is lazy and isn't actually reading, it is just assuming what is supposed
to be there and that assumption is occasionally wrong.

~~~
testcase_delta
I have dyslexia and find this simulation pretty accurate. Obviously it's just
a simulation though. When I read, letters aren't literally jittering around
the page, but I do have to do a lot of "double-takes": looking back at words
and thinking hard to decode them.

As a kid, reading aloud in class was always nerve wracking because of this.
The game was to do these double-takes so quickly that nobody could tell you
were doing all of this extra work. Often you read ahead of what you're saying
so that you can double-take before saying the word.

~~~
SteveGoob
> As a kid, reading aloud in class was always nerve wracking because of this.

Yup, reading out loud was the absolute worst. I have different issues though,
and because of my reading's tight associations with speech(1), I couldn't even
read ahead. I think my "only-when-read-out-loud" stutter comes from the social
anxiety I developed here.

(1) i.e. To read words with my eyes, I have to mentally speak them to myself.

------
gnicholas
I work in the field of dyslexia and always find these simulations be
interesting because they are in conflict with the so-called prevailing wisdom
regarding dyslexia here in the US.

Largely due to research out of Yale, there is an entrenched belief among many
dyslexia experts that dyslexia is not experienced visually, but is rather a
phonological condition. However, if you ask 10 people with dyslexia whether
their condition has a visual component, you will get at least 4 people (and
quite likely more) who say yes.

Websites like this reinforce the understanding that dyslexia does – at least
for some people — have a visual component. Fortunately, the international
community seems to be less allegiant to the Yale research.

They view dyslexia as a set of conditions that can be more visual for some and
more phonological for others. And there are also many practitioners (assistive
technologists, occupational therapists, tutors) in the US who share this
broader view of dyslexia.

But it remains baffling to me that so many of the "experts" in the US are
unwilling to listen to actual people with dyslexia who state in no uncertain
terms that they experience dyslexia in a visual way.

The reason this has come up as a frustration for me (as someone who works in
the field but does not have dyslexia) is that my startup's technology is
visual in nature. The tech I built [1] has become quite popular among people
with dyslexia — despite not having been created with this audience in mind.

I always assumed that experts/advocates would be happy to have another tool
that could help people with dyslexia. I never imagined that there could be
such a strong orthodoxy of "dyslexia isn't visual, it's phonological" could
exist. This website, and the comments in this thread, provide damning proof to
the contrary.

1:
[http://www.beelinereader.com/education](http://www.beelinereader.com/education)

~~~
avianlyric
This is interesting, I’m Dyslexic, but wouldn’t consider my experience to have
a visual component (or I don’t think of any visual component as being a
notable part of my experience).

However I do find tools like yours very useful, it makes reading much easier
for me. It definitely helps with line transitions, which I do have slight
difficulty with, but isn’t the primary cause of reading comprehension issues
for me. Instead most reading comprehension issues are my brain simply ignoring
or replacing words completely without me realising.

~~~
gnicholas
Glad to hear it helps! Do you find it only helping during line transitions, or
does it also help with the accidental ignoring/replacing of words?

------
thrav
I’d be interested to know what someone with severe dyslexia thinks of this
interpretation. I have a mild case (constantly flipping digits in numbers, but
rarely struggling with words) and my experience is much more swearing I just
read 1917 and then looking back and realizing it says 1971 and then having to
read it again because I was so sure it was 1917.

It’s true that the digits did jump around on me, but it’s not experienced as
active motion, as portrayed here. It’s more that I see a false representation
of what’s in the page.

I think words aren’t an issue because my brain is good enough at picking the
word from what’s there and context.

It would be more like rendering the page with a few different Random letters
swapped each time, rather than continuous movement of letters on the page.

~~~
foopod
It's almost like it needs eye tracking. Then swapping around letters while you
aren't looking at them.

~~~
smichel17
Maybe you could simulate this by asking the reader to highlight on the page as
they read (another commenter with dyslexia mentioned using this strategy)?
Then hold the words immediately before and after the end of the selection
constant. And maybe instead of randomly shuffling letters, swap out whole
words with likely mistakes (given the number of dyslexic people in these
comments, you could probably start with no substitutions and crowd-source a
list of _actual_ mistakes. To prevent the visual motion of swapping words from
being distracting, you could make all non-selected words be very low contrast
with the background. And if you wanted to be really fancy, maybe you could
only make selection persist for a certain amount of time or words, so one
can't simply select the entire document to fix it in place.

------
Guy2020
I have dyslexia. The best way I can explain it is that when I read, it's more
like I'm sampling from a probability distribution than actually seeing what's
on the page. This is why I have difficulty spelling too...because I'm not sure
which way something is spelled, i.e., when I sample from the spelling
distribution, multiple competing items come out and I don't know which one is
the correct one.

This website isn't accurate for me per say...but I guess it does capture the
"hazy" feeling when I read.

I do believe us dyslexics have significantly different brains. I get along
with dyslexics more than neurotypicals. We seem to have a strange bond. I
suppose we're more "abstract" thinkers...in the sense that we are used to
reasoning about spaces instead of particular instances...owing to the
probabilistic nature of our minds...but maybe I'm using the wrong language
here.

------
AlexB138
Somewhat related; I have a lesser known disability which is related to
dyslexia called dysgraphia[1]. For simplicity sake, I often describe it as
"like dyslexia, but for output instead of input". Basically, it makes it very
difficult to write legibly.

Dysgraphia, and (the often accompanying) ADD, are part of why I initially got
into computers. I would type much much more easily than I could write, so I
would beg teachers to let me type assignments instead of writing by hand,
which was significantly less common when I was young than it is today. In
retrospect, it's a good part of how I ended up working in technology.

Unfortunately it has, I think, also hampered my career. It makes it, as you
can imagine, significantly more difficult to whiteboard. My whiteboarding
either looks like something a child would produce, or requires immense focus
(often both), completely separate from the engineering consideration, to
produce what seems simple for most people.

Inconspicuous disabilities are such a strange thing to live with. They're not
evident, so I think it's difficult for people to relate to them. I really
appreciate the effort that was put into making the linked site and I hope it
makes it easier for people to understand the struggles some people deal with
without most other people ever noticing.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia)

~~~
apex_sloth
Thanks for your comment. In german both of these are usually group together,
so it never occurred to me that in english they are separated categorizes.
Even tho the word used "Legasthenie" means "reading weakness", it still is
applied to both cases.

As already was mentioned, there is a wide range of ways this can express
itself. I have something called "phonological processing deficits" [1], which
means that letters which sound similar k/g, d/t, b/p are hard to distinguishes
for me. In reading this is not much of a problem, in writing it I have extra
attention. In recent times I notices that I recognize misspelled words not on
the letters/sounds involved, but rather on the overall shape/silhouette of the
word, meaning the up and down of the letters.

1:
[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21109251/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21109251/)

------
anonytrary
Letters don't just abruptly appear to change to another valid letter. I like
to describe it as each letter oscillating in and out of different letter
eigenstates, appearing to smoothly interpolate between various letters. Once
you look directly at a letter, you collapse the letter to the correct state.

The letters are like 98% in the correct state, but contain small components of
other letters, giving a breathing/morphing effect like what you would see on
shrooms.

------
exabyte
I recommend reading the book "Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why
So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It" by Matthew Seidenberg.

It starts off with the history of writing, which I actually have to go back
and re-read because it's such a crazy evolution. Talk about standing on the
shoulders of giants. I can't imagine getting thrown back into the stone age
and having to figure out a way to communicate ideas.

It also talks about the fascinating ways that the brain uses different
modalities to converge on meaning - really made me thought a lot about machine
learning algorithms. It refers to a lot of well-designed studies with results
that provide valuable insights into the inner workings of the brain.

It also talks a lot about dyslexia and how it is a rather broadly defined
disorder. I'm pretty sure I could be considered dyslexic based simply on how
poor of a reader I am. This also, however, could explain why I did better with
math and science where you are doing yourself a great disservice to trying to
skim the texts. I read that shit at the pace of a snail, but hey, maybe that
allowed me to process the concepts better.

------
edapa
As a diagnosed dyslexic, this website feels nothing like what reading is like
for me. It might be representative of some dyslexic experience, but certainly
not mine.

------
QUFB
On the same theme, there are several videos on Youtube related to
schizophrenia. This is a particularly frightening one:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63lHuGMbscU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63lHuGMbscU)

------
rudolph9
I wish sites would stop forcing overriding the user default font or a least
render nicely with their custom font override. I use the [OpenDyslexic][1]
typeface which really helps but I’d say about 50% of sites I visit have custom
fonts and css rules dependent on their custom font.

This is particularly frustrating when viewing GCP or AWS support docs. I get
the lack of accessibility on marketing oriented sites but support docs for
major could providers should render coherently with an alternative font!

[[https://www.opendyslexic.org/](https://www.opendyslexic.org/)]: 1

~~~
manjalyc
This sounds like a problem a simple extension would trivially solve, I might
write one up and publish it later today when I have some free time. I’ll edit
this comment when I do.

Edit: Should've googled first, there seems to be plenty of extensions that
solve exactly this issue.

~~~
rudolph9
What exact issue does it solve?

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like with the OpenDyslexic typeface
[https://gist.github.com/rudolph9/e4e86fee61cccd722f6b56eb841...](https://gist.github.com/rudolph9/e4e86fee61cccd722f6b56eb84126810)

~~~
rudolph9
Actually now that I look at it again it's mostly the icons that aren't
rendering nicely. I've got OpenDyslexic installed in the OS and then set as
the font in firefox setting but for what ever reason "up arrow", "down arrow",
etc are rendering at text instead of icons. Any tips to fix this?

~~~
manjalyc
Hi, sorry I missed this - I seemed to misunderstand the question. There's a
simple fix that I guess I might now make an extension either today or tomorrow
depending when I have free time.

Here's how you could do it on your own, this is for the google cloud docs
reference
[https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/apis](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/apis).

Note you have to allow pages to set their own fonts in firefox if you use this
option

0\. Open up your console in dev-tools (F12).

1\. Load Jquery (Give it a second, let the script load)

    
    
      var jq = document.createElement('script');
      jq.src = "https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js";
      document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(jq);
    

2\. See all the font-families the page is using

    
    
      fontSets = new Set();
      $('*').each( function() {
        fontSets.add( $(this).css("font-family"))
      });
      console.log(fontSets)
    
    

for google cloud docs this reveals:

    
    
      Set(7) [ 
        "Roboto, Noto Sans, Noto Sans JP, Noto Sans KR, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Thai, Noto Sans Hebrew, Noto Sans Bengali, sans-serif", 
        "\"Material Icons\"", 
        "Google Sans, Noto Sans, Noto Sans JP, Noto Sans KR, Noto Naskh Arabic, Noto Sans Thai, Noto Sans Hebrew, Noto Sans Bengali, sans-serif", 
        "Roboto, RobotoDraft, Arial, sans-serif", 
        "Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif", 
        "Google Sans, Roboto, RobotoDraft, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif", 
        "Material Icons"]
    

3\. Make an educated guess, I guess its probably Material Icons that
OpenDyslexic is messing up, so lets update all the font-families that don't
contain Material Icons

    
    
      $('*').each( function() {
        if ( $(this).css("font-family").indexOf("Material Icons") === -1)
          $(this).css("font-family",`OpenDyslexic, ${$(this).css("font-family")}`);
      });

------
sam_goody
This has been on HN several times [1], [2].

I highly recommend that you skim through the other thread. I found, as someone
who deals with kids with dyslexia, that the insights helped me better
understand and deal with them.

Also, understanding the different types of dyslexia helped me organize some
contradictions I had heard.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226676)
[2]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677)

------
becausecombi
I could still read the ad titles. Goes to show that there's nothing that
marketing can't solve!

------
kilian
It's good to realize "dyslexia" is different for different people, with a
subset of them seeing "dancing letters" like this visualization shows. It's
still incredibly worthwhile to experience visualizations like this if only to
vaguely understand what it's like.

I implemented this particular vizualisation into Polypane so you can run it on
any website and from what I experienced with people with dyslexia, there are
definitely people that don't see a difference between this on or off.

------
greggman3
Tangentially related Chrome devtools now tries to simulate various vision
issues

[https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/03/devtools?u...](https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2020/03/devtools?utm_source=devtools#vision-
deficiences)

So maybe your designers with their tiny thin fonts can learn some compassion
for us poor sighted folk.

------
rhacker
I don't have dyslexia, but I found the webpage pretty easy to read except for
a few long words I didn't know. For those I just had to hover for a few more
seconds. That being said - if I had to look at that every time I read, I would
probably avoid reading for the rest of my life... so that is a challenge.

------
jm_l
I used a similar method to write a dynamic poem using javascript several
months ago ([https://jminjie.com/@Jordan/from-the-eyes-of-birds-
bd5bbe0c9...](https://jminjie.com/@Jordan/from-the-eyes-of-birds-bd5bbe0c91))

------
jp57
I’m waiting for the site that’ll let you experience what it’s like to have
ADHD.

Oh wait. That’s Twitter.

------
wrnr
I appreciate the effort but it focuses only on the disadvantages of dyslexia.
Their is good evidence that dyslexia an other learning-disabilities are a
neurological tradeoff between short and long Cortical Minicolumns, where
dyslexics have on average fewer and shorter column that are thicker, have less
connection, but that reach farther. Sort of like the difference between GPU
and CPU. Maybe we need a tool to showcase the advantage of interconnected
reasoning and narrative skills instead of just focusing on the negative
aspects.

~~~
apex_sloth
Thank you for your comment. This led me to reading about it and discovering
some interesting research on this topic!

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
> discovering some interesting research on this topic!

Please feel free to share :D

~~~
apex_sloth
I first found the book "The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential
of the Dyslexic Brain", which in turn talks about the spacing between
minicolumns in the brain. So looking for these terms yeilds some intressting
stuff, for example this:

[https://dept.wofford.edu/neuroscience/neuroseminar/pdfspring...](https://dept.wofford.edu/neuroscience/neuroseminar/pdfspring2010/autism&deslexia-
minicolumn.pdf)

[https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/12/12/dyslexia-and-
autis...](https://corticalchauvinism.com/2016/12/12/dyslexia-and-autism-
cognitive-profiles-at-the-tail-ends-of-the-same-spectrum/)

~~~
wrnr
Yes, The Dyslexic Advantage is a good start, it's where I first encountered
the science.

~~~
apex_sloth
I started it and are actually surprise how much it fits to my own experience
to this day. Can you recommend further reading? Thank you bring this to my
attention!

------
SilasX
At first I thought it was saying dyslexia makes text too small to read on
mobile, and then I realized it’s just the typical styling of a site that does
adaptive design poorly.

------
AnonC
Wikipedia says that there is no research showing that the commercial font
called Dyslexia is useful for people with dyslexia (in improving readability).
I also see free and open source clones like OpenDyslexic. [1] I presume this
wouldn’t help much either.

What else can web developers and/or content writers do to make content better
readable or more easier to comprehend (even if it’s by easy guessing)?

[1]: [https://www.opendyslexic.org/](https://www.opendyslexic.org/)

~~~
gnicholas
You're right that the research on these fonts is mixed. After receiving many
feature request emails from users, I offered OpenDyslexic in my browser plugin
that helps people read more easily (and which has been picked up as an
assistive technology for people with dyslexia).

I think the reason these fonts are popular with some people with dyslexia is
that they are heavier (thicker lines) and have more space between characters.
For some people, including people with visual impairments, these features make
reading easier. This is especially the case if the alternative is some super-
thin font that is dark grey, against a light grey background.

I've seen discussions in the WCAG (web accessibility) community and other
community around how to make reading easier for neurodiverse populations.
Unfortunately, most of what I've seen has been along the lines of "don't use
big words" and "use short/simple sentences". While this is all well and good
for some uses cases, it is not practical advice if your app is an ebook reader
or your website talks about complex financial instruments.

Fortunately, there are some layout-related things that you can do to make text
more inclusively designed, and you can check out the Center for Applied
Special Technologies' website for an interactive demo. [1] Full disclosure,
one of the technologies they feature was created by my startup, BeeLine
Reader. Let me know if you want to try out our JS on your site — contact info
is in my profile.

PS: the commercial font you reference is "Dyslexie", not "Dyslexia". A common
typo, I'm sure!

1: [http://demo.cast.org/cisl-demo/](http://demo.cast.org/cisl-demo/)

------
chis_
Another form of dyslexia is meres-irlen syndrome, such that the text can
ripple, blur, or white-spaces move about.

My partner said the visual experience from this video[1] is close to what she
experiences when trying to read text.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FARizLljRkc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FARizLljRkc)

~~~
rorykoehler
I think I had a form of this as a child. Words would not e arranged on a
straight line on the page but would be too high above the baseline or too low.
I haven't suffered this illusion since I was ~10 years old or so.

------
meigwilym
> With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It barely slows me
> down at all

Not unfair, but you've had a lifetime of non-dyslexic reading to perfect this
skill.

It may be exaggerated, but I found it interesting to see the difficulties that
dyslexics have to put up with. I really empathise with children trying to
learn to read with this condition.

------
golem14
It seems relatively easy to read known words, but almost impossible to read
long, complicated ones (like typoglycemia).

I can understand that learning to read with dyslexia is super frustrating...
This is a great way to make people understand what dyslexia feels like.

It would be amazing if we had something like that to understand what it’s like
to be black in America...

------
beefield
Reading all the comments I can't help appreciating two observations:

1\. How vastly differently we experience the world 2\. How little our
experience resembles what there actually is outside.

That brain of ours seems to be a real little f*cker what comes to creating an
illusion that we observe some kind of objective reality. I need to keep that
in mind.

------
kiba
Don't have dyslexia, but I am pretty bad at spelling and grammar(and no, no
amount of reading will change my grammar).

I can easily spot that I spelled a word wrong, but can't necessary spell.

I been remedying this through anki and spaced repetition, but it's a slow
process and my mind sometime switch to incorrect spellings anyway.

~~~
pietroglyph
Out of curiosity, is English your native language?

------
DarkWiiPlayer
Just a random dumb idea: this could likely be made much more freaky (and maybe
more realistic?) with an eye-tracker and possibly some letter morphing to hide
the actual changing from the reader, seems to me, would more closely resemble
what people with dyslexia here in this threat describe.

------
yoav
For me letters rarely move around, but words will move or disappear. Even then
though they don’t constantly shift, it’ll just not be there and then a minute
later it’s there.

My problem with numbers is that they add themselves together and move around.

So I might see something like:

\- 22

\- 376

\- 4021

As:

\- 242

\- 367

\- 4022

Which makes things like long division impossible or writing out my credit card
number in an online checkout take 5-10 minutes

------
surround
On a related note, there are fonts designed to make reading easier for people
with dislexia, such as OpenDyslexic.

[https://www.opendyslexic.org/](https://www.opendyslexic.org/)

~~~
airstrike
And also famously Comic Sans, though I don't know if there's actual research
supporting this popular claim

------
devxpy
I wonder if tts readers like google assistant's "read it" feature improve this
situation.

At least for me, having 2 sources of information greatly increases the degree
of comprehension and reduces eye fatigue.

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zipotm
Believe or not, I faced that for ~30 minitues after whole day of coding...
it's like combining and switching everything, from up and down, left and right
without any order...

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withinrafael
Compounding the frustration with trying to read this page is the sans-serif
font, making Is look like Ls, etc. This certainly makes a clear use case for
serifs in my head.

~~~
gnicholas
Funny, I hear so many people assert that serifs are worse for readability, and
that this has been 'proven'. It seems unlikely that such a thing could be
proven across the entire population, if a decent chunk of those people
(including you and me) state a preference for serifs.

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willejs
Previous discussion here
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677)

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cromulent
Previous lengthly discussion (2017):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226676](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15226676)

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k__
I'm just a very slow reader, have to read word by word.

I'm 35, is there anything to fix that?

I feel kinda bad about it, because I'm a professional writer.

~~~
zonovar
I have the same problem and I trying to tackle it bit following a few tricks
from speed readers. The main point as far as I can see is to stop your inner
voice. You can play classical music while reading (with no lyrics) so that it
drowns out your internal voice. Also saying random words to yourself, chew a
gum, or counting is used to override your brain from reading back the words in
your head. Hope this can help you.

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
> The main point as far as I can see is to stop your inner voice.

I just tried this while reading your comment and... I just can't xD

I'm even listening to music in the background, but my brain just blocks that
out the moment I start reading.

~~~
zonovar
I know! It's a struggle and it takes a very long time. I'm still practicing
too...

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ciarannolan
I've always wondered if that special Dyslexia font on Kindles actually helps.
Can anyone in this thread with Dyslexia enlighten me?

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antimora
I am dyslexic. I don't still cannot recall the full alphabet in the right
order. Does anyone else have the same issue?

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thrownaway954
i am dyslexic, this is an over exaggeration. most of the time i experience
words shifting. the only time i experience single characters shifting is
reading numbers. this is why i've tried to train my self to reading numbers in
pairs. for instance... i read phone number not as 5-5-5-1-2-1-2, but
55-51-21-2.

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youeseh
If I can read this website with relative ease, does that mean that I have
dyslexia? :-/

~~~
dpc_pw
I was going to ask similar question. I've read through it and had almost no
problems whatsoever. Is it weird or typical?

~~~
zeepzeep
Your brain's like an Intel processor, it's guessing what you are reading. Fast
but error-prone.

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stevage
> Wouldn't it be possible to do it i....y on a website with Javascript?

What is that missing word?

~~~
stevage
Oh...interactively.

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ghego1
Pro tip: visit the website without JavaScript and cure your dyslexia!

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dogma1138
Am I the only one that has no major problem reading this?

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mystcb
Interesting! I have to admit, I do look at that and think that it is a large
exaggeration - however that is acknowledged in other thread here.

On the other side, I suffer from migraines (the ones that give you auras and
take you out for days), and the visualisation of the letters changing is
exactly how words look when I try and read text during my aura phase. I am
going to have to borrow this site to explain to my doctor what I see here, as
this is probably the most accurate representation of the effect I have seen.
(TL;DR: Thank you!)

Now I need to look away, because the effect is causing my vision to go a
little funny! :)

~~~
DarkWiiPlayer
I used to have migraines with auras as well; in my case, it started with a
blind spot somewhere in my cone of vision that would gradually grow, sometimes
even covering my entire field of view except for a very tiny point I was
looking at.

The funny thing is, sometimes, I would still be perfectly capable of reading.
I didn't see the text, or at least didn't perceive it, but apparently it still
reached the parts of my brain responsible for interpreting writing.

If I remember correctly, there's even some people who have this as a permanent
condition, that is, are completely blind but can still read text even though
they don't even see it.

It's quite weird, honestly, and if it hadn't been for the fear of actual
migraine that would follow the aura distracting me, I imagine the experience
itself would have been quite uncomfortable on its own.

Another interesting effect was that in the days after a strong migraine, my
vision would stay messed up and start to get weirdly distorted whenever I
tried reading something, which might be quite similar to what dyslexia feels
like, at least for those cases where it's more on the visual side.

I've always found all of this incredibly fascinating, as it goes to show just
how complex the human brain is and how it can malfunction and react to
internal and external influences.

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rambojazz
How accurate is this?

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globular-toast
I still find it pretty easy to read. I'm quite sceptical about dyslexia.
Reading needs practice like anything else.

