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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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.
Mental math is so difficult for me that it’s embarrassing! The numbers just don’t stay in my head long enough. I used to feel anxiety if math came up in conversation because I simply can’t calculate in my head like others do, and it makes me feel like a fool.
In school, I’d think I’d be doing great on my math problems. When I’d get my work back, I did terrible because I’d accidentally change the numbers in the middle of the problem. I also always had a feeling that I missed some foundational information because nothing ever clicked for me. I put it down to switching schools a few times, but I think it may have been something more than that now. I was actually scared to even try programming because I was always told you need to be good at math, so I thought I would fail terribly.
> Mental math is so difficult for me that it’s embarrassing! The numbers just don’t stay in my head long enough. I used to feel anxiety if math came up in conversation because I simply can’t calculate in my head like others do, and it makes me feel like a fool.
This is a huge problem for me too, but I take solace in the observation that that isn't _math_, that's _arithmetic_.
I can relate to this. I was “bad” at math as a child, and was so bored by its basics or at least how they were taught. I never had a good foundation and so never got to takeTrig or Calculus in high school. Later, during my PHD studies, I discovered I was great at set theory, and went on to learn programming. I realized I was never “bad” at math. I was poorly taught. As a result, I had trouble holding numbers in my head to work with them.Now that I am “good” at math, I find this much easier.
I bore/regale/tell/tormwnt everyone I talk with about anything math related, that mathematics and calculation (with numbers) is entirely different abilities. I do this because I've heard so many stories similar to your about people thinking they are bad at math where the only issue turns out to be the digits, numbers, and holding them in you head. Which, quite frankly is not something very relevant to most of mathematics, and as you relate, when you get at ease with the actual math, dealing with numbers usually gets a bit easier.
If not, there exists specific training that helps a significant fraction of people to get better at handling the actual numbers, training which also is completely unrelated to maths.
I don't have any problems with numbers or math. But I do have the same issue with time conversion in Dutch. I also have problems with tens. In Dutch you say "four and sixty" for 64, which I find terribly confusing and I often replace it with 46 internally. I tend to read numbers in English for that reason.
Oh man, so this is an actual problem? I've had this a lot as well, but I only have it with numbers and with multiple choice tests.
For example, if I'm given a reading passage, I can accurately answer questions about it. But once those are put in A/B/C/D or 1/2/3/4 options, I will absolutely mess them up. I will know the answer is A, I will put my pencil down on the A bubble, I will fill in A, then later on I'll see that somehow I filled in C.
I had this problem a lot on tests and thought that maybe I was just being dumb and not having the correct answer, since usually you only get a scantron sheet back with zero context. About 3 years ago I started doing practice tests for language learning, of which many questions were multiple choice. I'd write the full answer for extra practice, finish the test, wait a couple minutes, then go back and check my answers. The written part of the answer would match up most of the time. The letter/number preceding it was wrong 1/4 of the time.
I've also had it with math exams a few times, where I mix up digits usually around decimal points. Sometimes it even happens when coding and those are really tough problems to debug.
Wait this is a thing!? I always thought it was just me :O
My whole life I’ve been swapping 2 and 5. Or I go to write 6 and 5 comes out. Stuff like that.
Only numbers tho. Letters are fine.
One trick I’ve found when checking numbers is to compare them both forwards and backwards as a sort of checksum. This has become less of an issue now that you can almost always copypaste but still comes handy
That certainly explains why some dyslexic people seem to be decent at reading but not at spelling. If there's no static truth to the perceived spelling, even to the author, it's got to be nearly impossible to reliably spell.
I am dyslexic and this is very true to me. I can read perfectly fine, although I may re-read a word occasionally, or highlight the page as I read to track where I am (A tick I was taught in school to help).
But when it comes to writing its a different ballgame. With a computer its not so tricky (and its easy to hide... hello backspace), but with a pen and paper I make mistakes all time. After many years of practice I am fairly used to taking my time and making sure I spell properly now, but I still make mistakes, and its still kind of shit when you think you've nailed the spelling, re-read everything and then someone points out mistakes you didn't even know were there. Especially the people who act like you didn't even try... Oh well.
Same here, it is actually how I got into computers, my writing was so bad (I have dysgraphia) that they put me in a special computer lab in the 3rd grade. I am 45 so, that was not a common thing back then. My grades improved and I did well in school, but I am functionally illiterate when it comes to actually hand writing anything. I can tell what something says when I read back something I wrote, but if you where to look at it, well it might as well be hieroglyphs, it is completely illegible to anyone else.
But when it comes to typing I do OK, I transpose letters here and there, but I get by and I can read just fine, it's just in my writing that one can really tell there is something off.
Then you are one up on me. My handwriting is so bad that I myself often have difficulty reading it. It has never made much difference to me professionally. Anything that really matters is typed into some sort of device.
People at meetings often comment that I take few notes. Typing during a meeting is impolite imho and my handwriting of notes would be less than useful. So I just listen and have learned to remember what was said until I can minute it later.
I find the physical act of writing helps me remember things. There's been research on this that suggests that the processesing you need to do to write something down secures it in your memory better.
I am 100% the same. I can read fluently, and at a good speed, but I cannot write legibly to save myself. I have such poor fine control with a pen/pencil that I have to hold it in a death-grip and tense my hand and arm muscles to control the letter shapes and even then it feels like the pen/pencil is fighting back. My handwriting is unreadable unless I write in capitals all time. Once I do manage to get the words down on paper, most of the time the words have letters all in the wrong order. It's really frustrating - but at least in these modern times, I rarely have to write anything manually so there's that.
This sound very similar to reading in dreams. When you read something in a dream multiple times it will change between readings. This is a common technique to detect dreams in order to "start" lucid dreams.
When I try this the text and meaning changes, but the context stays the same. For example reading an invitation: It stays an invitation but date and location change whenever I read it.
I am dyslexic as well, and have the exact experiences you describe. I wonder of a better "simulation" is the random subtle replacement of words in a text with other words, as well as the subtle change of spelling of new or unfamiliar words (e.g., names). Not the best but maybe slightly better.
Not dyslexic, but I understand the symptoms fairly well after doing a couple research papers on it. In order to do a good simulation, I think there would need to be an eye movement sensor involved, so that when the eyes bounced back to a word to re-read it, corrected text could be swapped in. Do you think that would make a better sim?
This happens to me from time to time as well, not in this particular case. I think it's related to the fact that my mind has created a certain context, and I don't read with full attention. I will regularly skip over words unintentionally and "fill in the blanks".
Sometimes I think this is an artifact of occasionally looking at groups of words as a single term. If I read each word deliberately, I don't encounter this problem.
From my understanding of dyslexia, this is not it.
Actually yeah, that sounds a lot better. You're right, if there's no eye movement tracking, people who are not dyslexic would immediately stumble on the text.
That's a cool way to put it. I'm not dyslexic, but I've had this phenomenon happen many times before. The word literally changes in front of you when you reread it. Perception is a powerful tool but far too often we conflate our superimposed visual experience with the reality it samples.
The website in the OP reminds me more of the experience of trying to read during a semi-lucid dream, or my experience with deliriants. The "visual fuzz" created from letters jumping around and changing before your eyes. I would look at my clock and it might be two different times superimposed on each other, or just a completely different language or set of symbols.
It's a nerve-wracking experience when caused by a deliriant, but it's also a common tool I use to help me realize I'm in a dream to break into lucidness. The clock will almost never read the same way twice in a dream! Often neither will a sign or piece of paper.
Silly question: I recently started learning to read sheet music and I've noticed I have real difficulty counting the number of lines between two notes in the pentagram. If there's just one it's pretty clear, but if they're 2-3 or more it's like my mind can't tell them apart unless I put mi finger on top to obstruct the sight gradually.
A similar thing happens to me if there's to many of the same number/letter together (for example, in 000043452 I have a lot of trouble counting the number of zeroes).
I always thought it was normal, but it feels very similar to this website. Do I have a mild form of dyslexia? or is it normal?
I recently wondered something similar. I "learned" to play music as a child, but could never follow the notes so used to memorize the tune and use the staves as a reference for the timings. Other than with music, my reading has always been above average.
I've always assumed this was laziness on my part, and so I've recently tried to re-learn music reading, and it is getting easier (recently found PianoBooster software which has been quite useful), but still finding it difficult to read even a single note.
There was a recommendation when I went to Uni to get tested for dyslexia, even if you have no symptoms, because more people have it than you would think. And given that there is a range of types and symptoms, the possibility that this is a form of dyslexia is reasonably high.
That said, the fact that anyone can read anything is fairly remarkable when you think about it. I don't know whether we have any evolutionary basis for the repeated recognition of small characters, but I doubt it, and if so the fact that a large proportion of our brains are malleable enough to be trained for it is something impressive.
I'm just gonna have to keep practising and hope something clicks. Good luck!
This seems pretty normal. I suspect this is similar to reasons why it's hard to read a really wide line of text, or that some people put a sheet of paper under their current line while reading. Something about how our minds can manage smaller groups more easily. Probably related to how telephone numbers split up and why we put commas or spaces in numbers like 1,000,000.
For most disorders, a mild case is "normal". People who have more severe cases are classified as "abnormal". (And people who have less severe cases than normal are classified gifted/talented/superpowered.)
Serious question; how do you know this is an exaggeration? I would assume you have no way of knowing what this site looks like to non-dyslexics, as you are effectively overlaying real dyslexia on top of simulated. Like looking at a painting of an acid trip while actually on acid, you’d have no idea whether it was representative or not.
I don’t understand how it would be possible to ever replicate it though, unless someone could be cured and then judge it’s realism.
I understood this site to be replicating the reading experience, rather than a literal reflection of what you see.
Through concentration and compensation skills we've acquired over the years, some dyslexic people can read _almost_ normally. At least, that was the case for me. If I really mentally exert, I can often force myself to read fluidly and read almost as if proficient. The problem is that it is costly to do so and highly conditional.
For example: Doing reading comprehension tests in school, I would often perform well, if not a bit slowly. Given a book report, however, I would not be able to keep up such effort for very long; reading that way was very strenuous. Furthermore, when tasked with reading out loud, I slow to a crawl, begin to stutter, and translate inaccurately.
Anyways, my point is that, we can sometimes read normally, it can just be extra difficult.
As for this example specifically, I can't speak to its authenticity since I don't have the "moving characters" symptoms. My issues mostly revolve around poor eye tracking.
I’m not dyslexic, but after a poor reaction to general anaesthetic, I had problems with my saccades for a while, and it manifested very much like this. Nothing would hold still, and I’d see stuff in the wrong place.
I wonder if dyslexia is as “simple” as a saccadic deficiency at root...
I don't think that's what dyslexia is. It's a flaw at a different level of perception, or else people with dyslexia (like myself) wouldn't have difficulty spelling or keeping left right straight. I can read fine, but spelling is hell.
I also think dyslexia is a much wider category with many different root cause than most people talk about. Kinda like how autism exists on a spectrum the same thing is true for dyslexia.
There are tools that overlay lines over text, or only show a line at a time. Apparently this can help to train your eyes to not dart around during the saccade.
I've noticed this happening to me a few times per day. I've noticed it more in the last few months than at any other time in my life...
What's the frequency with which a dyslexic person experiences this?
.......
from my other comment:
See, for example... when I first read this comment, I read:
"Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it (eye movement sensor) correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
...
This is getting really common for me. I'll read a sentence in a way that makes perfect sense, then go back, re-read it, and discover I misread one of the words. It's frustrating because I don't have any indication something is amiss. Is this abnormal?
I have a moderate colour vision deficiency and I sometimes experience something very similar with colours.
I'll see a bunch of things, all the same colour. Then I'll realise it's supposed to be colour coded and they'll start swapping colours until they settle down. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
I had this a lot in school with red and green on the whiteboard.
I think I've experienced this a few times, even though I'm not dyslexic. This happened when I haven't slept for long time and reading something at 4 am gave me that "thoughts out of focus" feeling, when the words are right in front of me, I know I can read them, but experiencing a funny difficulty assembling the letters together. This also happened a couple times on the half-asleep state when I've almost woken up, but still seeing the dream and for a few seconds I had this strange "out of focus" state when focusing attention on words or speech is difficult.
I've found I mostly just momentarily see things that are not there, like at all. It doesn't even surprise me much anymore, not that being used to sleep deprivation is a good thing :)
> 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.
No, that was a humorous email purporting to cite "rscheearch" that never existed. People cannot read easily when the internal letters of a word are scrambled; the "scrambling" performed in the email intentionally leaves most of the structure of the word in place.
The quote's claim is that they can still be read "fairly easily." The Microsoft link is a study that says ~10% slow down. I think that actually confirms the claim, not debunks it.
The Microsoft link is a study that shows 10% slowdown when reading text in which each word has one or fewer transposition of two adjacent internal letters.
Scrambling the internal letters leads to much greater difficulty.
The link notes this explicitly:
> This study only looked at letter transpositions of a single position, like the kinds used in the original hoax. I can only speculate how dramatically reading speed would be hurt with more dramatic transpositions
This is a bit much, but let me give you a couple of real world examples of names that I've read over and over yet somehow managed to misread every time.
I read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy many times, and managed to see the name Grandalf instead of Gandalf every single time.
I was looking up a quote from a former Intel CEO just tonight and found out that his name wasn't Paul Ortelli, but Paul Otellini.
I insert letters that are not there, remove letters that are, and reorder whatever is left all the time.
I don't have the general problems with reading, but I do have the problem you mentioned. And I'm also kind of a speed reader, I think the problem is here.
As sibling comments say, this is a common feature of learning to write that doesn't indicate dyslexia.
One of my relations wrote completely mirrored for a time, that was interesting. It did make me wonder if their brain was flipping the entire World; they've corrected it now. It reminded me of, da Vinci, who I think write in mirror writing for himself but used regular writing when writing for others.
Up to a certain age, the S/b/d/p/q issue is considered normal. I certainly did it through early elementary school, and since I have ADHD, I've been screened for dyslexia enough times to be fairly confident I don't have it. All 4 of my kids still did this at the end of first grade, with only one to go on to be diagnosed with dyslexia.
I think flipping and mirroring letters is just using our ability to see that the shapes are the same. You have to do some unlearning in a way, or rather recognizing that rotating a shape changes its meaning.
Yeah, I think most people don't read words, but recognize their shape, first and last letters being most significant. That's why it is relatively easy to read text with words internally scrambled. Unusual names, long words that are first learned from text, misread once and remembered like that forever. This is especially easy if you don't normally pronounce words while reading.
I still have to double take on "invertebrate", because I originally read it as "intervertebrate" or something like that :).
That's funny. I see that happening with some words or names especially (I can't remember an example I realized the other day).
It might just be that the brain "shortcuts" some things and change the way it's perceived. Insertion of an r in some places is an actual linguistic phenomenon (more on the Otellini case).
I have no idea how accurate this simulation is but this part of your comment made me think:
>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.
That's only true when you've already reached a high level of fluency and are used to reading fast. You need to have a deep "predictive" knowledge of the language as well as a photographic memory of the shape of the words. That works well for literate native speakers but that wouldn't work well at all for a learner of the language, even at an intermediate level.
Since dyslexics have a hard time learning to read correctly, it's possible that they struggle to reach that level of fluency where you can just skim through text without paying attention to the small details of the spelling.
It's definitely an exaggeration but it's one of the better simulations I've seen for the type of dyslexia I personally have. Though it's worth noting that dyslexia is experienced differently by different people.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to voice a couple of common complaints I have when people name things.
1. Please don't use words that written like acronyms but are designed to be read as an English word, for example NGINX (web server) and SPDY (HTTP/2 precursor). They are hard to parse because they're seemingly random letters and even harder for many of use to guess how they should be pronounced.
2. Closely related to point 1, but please don't drop letters from English words or even replace letters with other letters that is roughly pronounced the same. Imgur exhibits both these problems and it was years before I grokked how to pronounce that site.
I get naming things is hard, even harder as all the catchy names for things get snapped up, but the trend of having misspelt words as a way of acquiring shorter domain names hurts anyone who struggles with English (as I'd imagine this would be as true for any non-native English speakers as it is for those who's first language is English but suffer with reading difficulties).
I'm a non-native english speaker and, in my case, it doesn't bother me at all, but as I was reading it made me realise that when I see names like those, I just read them in my native language. I've always read imgur like "eem-gur", NGINX as "ngheenx", and SPDY was the only one I quickly spotted the "speedy" lookalike. For the rest I usually just say the letters (I always say S-Q-L and not sequel). I think that not having a native english developer community around me meant that nobody really cared about how you pronounce things.
SQL has the opposite problem in that it's legitimately an acronym (Structured Query Language) but is often colloquially pronounced as a word (sequel). However "S-Q-L" (spoken as letters) is technically correct.
I don't know if the "Sequel" pronunciation is a recent thing (relatively speaking to the age of the language itself) but it's only been the latter half of my career that I've heard people favouring that over "S-Q-L". In fact "Sequel" really threw me at first.
I remember failing a telephone interview once because I didn't know what `chmod 777` did. However I've always known it as "chi-mod" and the interviewer phrased the question as "What is C-H-M-O-D 7-7-7" so I started thinking it was an ISO / ANSI type standard I hadn't heard of and didn't make the connection it was a UNIX command. I remember being rather pissed off about that considering, at that time, I'd had > 10 years of UNIX systems administration so was intimately familiar with `chmod`.
I've always mentally pronounced chmod as changemod (and changepass, changeroot, changegroup), I guess it was sort of intuitive. Going back to the comment about dyslexia and naming, the unix core utils are probably a good example of "a lot" of abbreviated names that might be difficult to read for people with dyslexia. I wonder if there is a project to automatically create long named aliases for those (list, move, copy, remove...)
Pronunciation of shortened technical jargon is an interesting thing. I've noticed certain common variations but outside of very localized "communities" (like the employees of a particular company) it's not clear to me that there is a particular regional or community pattern for most of them.
* I've always assumed the conventional way to pronounce `chmod` was something like "ch-mod" (i.e., "chŭ-mod", with a short u). Is that less common than I think?
* `char` (like the C-style character variable type) is an interesting example. I've always read it as - and usually heard it as - "car". But there are groups where "char" (like the word meaning "burn") is more common. Strangely no one seems to say "care", which would be the corresponding part of the root word "character", right?
* "JSON" is another curious one. I've always just read that as "Jason" (like the name) but others seem to emphatically drop the missing "A", saying it more like "j-SON".
* For that matter, I've always read `fsck` like "f-seek", but apparently the creators intended it as "fisk".
Is there some kind of ethnographic study on this topic? Surely there are identifiable communities of these, but I've never been able to discern the broader pattern. I'm guessing it was once relatively regional, but it's probably more broadly distributed (and maybe domain/community-based) in the post-YouTube/podcast era.
I always read clang as "C-lang", then heard a LLVM developer said "cling". I feel like if the pronunciation is not obvious, the project should at least specify it somewhere offically.
When I hit a long word I didn't already know/expect I was lost, on "letters" I was stuck because it looked like a noun beginning "I" (poor don't choice), even "reading" have me pause because the kerning made "rn" appear as "m".
Imagine trying to learn to read like that, unpossible!
I'm dyslexic and I think this is likely less about exaggeration and more about trying to create an experience. In my experience it's not that the letters jump around it's that I can't focus on the words and process them at the same time so I'm constantly jumping from word to word and re-reading. FWIW, visual dyslexia is actually quite a bit less common than auditory.
For example, I have the visual type and can listen to content at 350 to 450 words per min depending on what I'm reading. Many people with auditory dyslexia can speed read visually.
On of the most famous common threads between the two is that learning to read the traditional way takes longer for people with Dyslexia if you have auditory, visual or a combination of the two. It's common for people with Auditory dyslexia to also have speech problems as kiddos.
I definitely didn't take it to be a simulation of the mechanics - but a rough feeling of what it's like to be taxed and burdened on something you're used to taking for granted
I should note that I've played thousands of Scrabble and Boggle games. My brain may be particularly trained for comprehending this sort of thing. I'm also good at these sorts of word puzzles in general, and have a large vocabulary. So I'm biased in many ways.
First and last letters give me no problems, because they are next the space.
I wish there was a speed / interval slider to this simulator, assuming this is 10 speed and 10 interval I'd say a 8 speed 2 interval (fast change, but less often) would give more realistic results
On first read, I noticed that I started reading the words fairly easily but then it started to feel random. I read your comment then went back and it does seem as though if the first and last letters remained the same, I could read the word much easier than if the were scrambled.
Yeah, there's that well known demonstration that shows that it doesn't really matter the order of letters within a word as long as the first and last letters remain the same.
It really does matter when the words are longer. With short words there’s a limited number of permutations, and letters can’t move far from their real positions. And that demonstration didn’t even attempt to fully scramble the internal letters, it was a rather cherry-picked example. In a language like English with a lot of short words it works better than in others.
When testing on myself (only 1 data point, I know) it actually seemed that having the first letter in the correct position made the biggest difference. So even on long words having first and last letters placed correctly made the biggest difference in readability for me compared to words that had more than 2 letters in the correct position but in the middle.
From playing around with this at worst they were equally unreadable[0], the best case was the first/last letter helped. Eventually I'd be able to decipher any word but by no means did my brain just visually did the replacement "on the fly" or close to it.
It would be interesting to see the study debunking this and the methodology. Do they take into account how many position each letter is shifted, how many had switched order not just shifted to the same direction or same number of shifts, will phonetic languages make a difference (in English removing one letter can vastly change the phonetics and make you miss the similarities with the original), etc.
[0] A quick and likely imperfect example resulting in words that cannot be recognized despite the high commonality:
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's not just your brain. It's how vision works in general. Everyone has physical blind spot (where the optic nerve attackhes to the retina) but no one can see it except if they carefully hunt hor it. Everyone can see high resolution only in a tiny area at the center of the visual field, and imagines the rest.
With dyslexia (and various physical vision problems), you're collecting even less input (due to misprocessing at some "lower layers"), so your higher-level recognition/comprehension brain has to fill in more missing deails, and so has a higher error rate.
I think our brains just picks all the letters in a word, mixes them up together into something like "e:a:l:p = 1:1:1:2", adds context and does a lookup into a dictionary of such "letters mix" -> meaning pairs. If this is correct, dyslexia is when the brain can't quickly estimate the "amount" of each letter in a word, and the incorrect proportions result into an incorrect lookup.
That analogy is close but doesn't quite match my experience because there doesn't have to be much overlap in letters in a word. I went back and reread a few of my most recent HN comments looking for an example (my condition impacts both reading and writing). There are some easy to understand mistakes like replacing "went" with "want". However I also used "because" in place of "beyond" in one comment. Those two words start with the same two letters, but they are completely different after that and are relatively distinct visually.
An algorithmic analogy I would use would be fuzzy matching. Most people's brains are set to look for exact matches (or fuzzy matching with a super high match criteria). When one part of their brain needs access to a word, the other part of their brain will supply the exact match. My brain is using fuzzy matching with the confidence level set mistakenly low. When part of my brain needs a word, the first match returned is occasionally a false positive match. The rest of my brain just accepts it and continues onto the next requested word. The match quality isn't a traditionally fuzzy matching algorithm like Levenshtein distance. It is heavily weighted to both the start of the word and the expectedness of the word in the given context. The latter makes it very difficult for me to immediately notice my own written mistakes since I am already primed to expect what I intended to write and not necessarily what I actually wrote.
Your second paragraph seems quite insightful. I will occasionally write out the wrong word, only to re-read the incorrect word as the word I intended to write, totally missing my mistake. As you describe, I think most often it relates to the 'fuzzy matching' of the first few bits of a word, my brain auto-completes the action of selecting the wrong letters for the word as the intended word.
I seem to be able to break the spell in a number of ways. When I'm re-reading a final draft of something (say an important email) I will try to eliminate context and deliberately read each word individually. Another way to break this spell is to read a document much later in time. Sometimes the pattern matching self-corrects later, or seemingly I have forgotten the verbatim phrasing of the idea that I previously wrote, and so upon reading I pick up the mistake.
I read thousands of words per day, probably write well into the hundreds. Fortunately, the amount of errors for me is very low, but if this were to happen with increased frequency, reading and writing would be quite stressful.
Yep, trying to give myself extra time to forget the exact intent of the writing and revisiting it later was my primary approach through school. However the absolute lifesaver since then has been text-to-speech software. Listening to my writing being read back to me makes it absolutely obvious when I used an incorrect word.
I have the word thing too. But my brain tends to pull words from adjacent lines. I never thought that I had it writing, but I do remember writing two words in the wrong order earlier today.
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.
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.
But I think your disagreement with Yale is a spat of semantics. (It doesn't help that Yale seems confused about what "phonology" means, as they seem to blur its modern meaning of "linguistics at the scale smaller than words" with the old meaning of "letter sounds" -- perhaps they go too far in "dumbing down" the language for the general public audience). Is it hard to track sentences across linebreaks? Sure. Is that dyslexia? It's also hard to read when you are extremely farsighted or have very low light vision.
It seems clear to me that there's a visual component of reading paragraphs, and then Beeline can help with that.
But that's a bit different from difficulty reading letters and words. Do you have research on how Beeline (or other visual theories) affect single-word or single-line reading?
I understand your frustration, though. The education and medical establishment have trouble with complexity and overlapping phenomena and spectral disorders. We see the same thing nowadays where "autism" has lot nearly all its meaning,
having grown to include anyone with any basket of symptoms, even people with easily identifiable chromosomal disorders. This happens because institutions needs single term to describe their entire educational/research program, because insurance only pays for treatment for certain blessed disorders, and because lay people need a way to communicate with other and share resources.
(BTW, it's confusing that the demo control buttons are so far from the text they affect. It took me a while to realize that the site wasn't broken.)
Glad you like BeeLine! There is certainly some confusion around what exactly "phonology" refers to, and some of this is because the word has different meanings in different contexts/disciplines.
Thanks also for the feedback on the demo control buttons on the BeeLine website. It was closer previously but then we redesigned things and it floated up to the top. Useful to know that we've taken a step backwards in some regards...
> 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
From the research I have seen - nobody is saying it isn’t experienced visually, they are stating that it isn’t a problem stemming from the visual systems - there is a huge difference.
I recall reading about a study many years ago where the dyslexic participants did significantly better at reading colored text on colored background, rather than black on white text.
If true that would certainly suggest a visual component, no?
As you say though, I would be surprised if the root cause was the same for every individual.
Colored backgrounds and colored transparencies seem to be helpful for some people. However, research in this area has been mixed, and of course it's impossible to do a double-blind test when the intervention is so clearly apparent.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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)?
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
I created this [1] to help people read more quickly, and it's won awards from Stanford and the United Nations. Try it out, and if it works for you I'm happy to shoot you a free pass (contact info in profile).
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.
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! :)
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.
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.