Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrav | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

like with this. https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/

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.

I’m dyslexic and for me, it’s hard to explain what happens exactly, but basically a lot of words are improperly understood to be what they are by my brain. This leads me to think they are different words and then the context of the thing I’m reading is not right. So I re-read paragraphs a number of times, very slowly. Because of this, I read at 50ish wpm with around 40% comprehension. I usually use a text to speech or screen reader to get long reading done, but people never take dyslexics into account when they design things so that can be a pretty miserable experience

Digits move around for me a lot when I spend a bit of time with numbers. I have wondered if this is something I should get tested.

I can't do phone numbers or OTP for the life of me.

Part of the reason I got into programming is that I kept mixing up numbers in high school in the show-your-work phase that led me to the wrong answer saved by partial credit. I built programs on my TI-86 that would output each step of that phase and would meticulously write things down number by number.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com