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Dyslexia
- muzzammildotxyz 9y agoThat was really good, can you please explain how did you do it?
- ronjouch 9y agoJust use "View Source" (Ctrl/Cmd + U) in your browser, the source is clear and not minified. Look for "messUpWords".
- geon 9y agoIt's pretty funny to use the dom inspector in Chrome, since the effect works on the script source code as well.
- konart 9y agoNot the author, but you can find sources following the link: https://github.com/geon/geon.github.com/blob/master/_posts/2016-03-03-dsxyliea.md https://github.com/geon/geon.github.com/blob/master/_posts/2... Basically - you leave first and last letters of the word where they are, and mix all other characters randomly at random times.
- konart 9y agoHad no problems reading this even as a non-native speaker. This is similar to the case when you mess around with "inner" letters of the word, but leave first and the last ones in their places (I've read about this experiment 10 years ago maybe). While the word changes - you still able to read it in text (other words are transformed too in this case obviously).
- agumonkey 9y agoIt's true that first and last letters are huge hints. With context it makes for a shorter space search.
- ptero 9y agoI had the same experience (also a non-native speaker). Being a non-native speaker might actually help -- when learning English I had to learn to guess meaning of unknown words when reading quickly and I think that skill is still with me (possibly as a detriment). While I suspect in the end I can understand the dyslexic text just as well as a normal one, reading this required significantly higher concentration and was much slower.
- omginternets 9y agoIt worked for me until I stumbled upon a word I didn't know: typoglycemia.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI had no problems reading this as a non-native speaker... until I hit first advanced medical term. If you know the words, then reading is easy. But I can see how it can seriously disturb the process of learning new or difficult words.
- richrichardsson 9y ago"Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty with LEARNING to read fluently". You may have read it, but you didn't understand it!
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThat's the crux of the matter IMO, most people reading this page already learned how to read; the brain takes shortcuts in recognising words (like the garbled inner part of words as another commenter mentioned). But if your brain isn't able to develop those shortcuts (due to dyslexia), yeah. Try teaching a child to read with a page like this.
- walshemj 9y agoErr not all dyslexics have problems with reading I am Dyslexic and had a reading age of 20 at 11 :-) Writing and spelling however I am very bad at
- konart 9y agoI'm pretty sure that title was changed since the original posting. The original one was something like: "Try to read it". That's pretty much it.
- Broken_Hippo 9y agoThat's seriously not true for folks with mild dyslexia. That's why folks don't necessarily find out until adults: no actual difficulty learning to read, but sometimes it results in weird things that weren't picked up on when we were kids. Spelling, for example. Getting left and right mixed up. Certain behavioral traits. More trouble with reading as one gets older and has more to read and/or difficult texts.
- danellis 9y agoFunny thing: I keep getting left and right mixed up since I moved from the UK to the US. It's as though my subconscious understanding of "left" was always "the side cars drive on". Flipping that also flipped the words in my head.
- nxsynonym 9y agodidn't have too much difficultly, but now all the letters on every page are swimming.
- lr4444lr 9y agoIt was not actually as hard as the author had probably thought. Relevant?[0] [0]https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8628/is-it-true-that-only-the-positions-of-the-first-and-last-letter-in-a-word-matter https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8628/is-it-true-...
- fiblye 9y agoIt's not hard when you have a context and assume the proper readings of the word. Dyslexia makes it hard to establish the background of what a word should be, so no emulation will be perfect.
- geon 9y agoThere is a link to the wikipedia article about the phenomenon. Unfortunately, it seems to be butchered to oblivion atm. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Typoglycemia&oldid=758271044 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Typoglycemia&oldi...
- Double_a_92 9y agoIt's actually quite easy to read such scrambled words, unless they are some uncommon technical term that I've never seen before.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoImagine as a child or if you were previously illiterate, every single one of those words will be an uncommon term - so it makes it much harder to learn to read words in this way.
- richrichardsson 9y agoDing ding ding. Too many people quick to boast how they had no trouble reading this yet they completely missed the 1st (major!) point of the text: "Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty with LEARNING to read fluently"
- Olreich 9y agoIt seems to me that since fluent readers can still read this dyslexic text, that it's not that our brains can't learn to read it, but that we suck at teaching how to read to people with dyslexia.
- agumonkey 9y agoLovely. I love to see how the brain can manage going through "hurdles". Gives insight in how our brains handle parsing. Very nice. Also: it tames my pseudo ADHD and helps me focus a lot. I'm tempted to have this for all text.
- grondilu 9y agoI had hard times reading this (about 10 times slower than normal text). What does that say about me?
- asadjb 9y agoWhile I agree with the other comments that it wasn't impossible to read these letters, I could feel a real strain on my eyes and thought process while reading the page. I had to "concentrate" in-order to understand each letter, something I don't have to do with normal text. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to constantly have to read everything like that. Also, while most words were easy to make out, the ones that I don't use in everyday life; like "Typoglycemia" were impossible to figure out. I had to check what it was linked to.
- Klathmon 9y agoI have some mild dyslexia, and for me the biggest thing is that the letters don't "jump around", they are permanently out of place, or in some cases letters are consistently "added". I play a videogame where there is a character named "Medivh" (pronounced ma-deev). Even knowing that, even having played that character for over a year, I still read it as med-va. And a lot of words are like that, I'll be reading along and hit a word like constantly and read it as "consistently" even though it doesn't make sense, then get confused and need to re-read. Or like in your second sentence I read "concrete-trate" and had to reread it to make sense of the word.
- seba_dos1 9y agoSwitching letters and words like what you described happens to me occasionally *but not consistently) when I'm really tired or not fully awake yet. Just wondering - do fonts like https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/ make it easier for you to read?
- Klathmon 9y agoI don't know if openDyslexic works for me, I really don't like the look of the font and haven't really read it long enough to see if it makes a difference.
- naikrovek 9y agoIs it easier to type with your eyes closed? I guess I don't know if it's the eyes doing things wrong or some language center somewhere in the mind.
- nanoniano 9y agoDidn't see the point on this post. Then I realised I have JS off. cf.: https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089 https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089
- wklm 9y agohaha exactly same here :)
- sleepychu 9y agoSeems like the cure for dyslexia is disabling JS.
- geon 9y agoI suppose all 2 users with js disabled frequent hn. ;)
- danellis 9y agoSurely this? https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/669488129150177280 https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/669488129150177280
- pwdisswordfish 9y agoI wonder if that page looks normal to dyslexic
- stephengillie 9y agoThis is close to how it feels when I get a "migraine flash". 2 differences - letters you're not looking at directly (a line or 2 down the page) don't move or jump. Often, key letters will just completely disappear. In their place is...a kind of grey blank that your mind jumps over. You could swear there's something there, and you can see it when you move your eyes quickly across the word, or out of the corner of your eye when you read the previous or next word, but it disappears when you steady your eyes on that word.
- hellofunk 9y agoI agree, as a migraine sufferer the vision aspect of migraines often looks like a "heat shimmer" film over everything, and this site resembles that.
- croon 9y ago> This is close to how it feels when I get a "migraine flash". 2 differences - letters you're not looking at directly (a line or 2 down the page) don't move or jump. This could be a freaky/fun thing to do as a VR demo. Or one of the eye tracking kits.
- nenreme 9y agoThis sounds like scintillating scotoma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillating_scotoma
- falsedan 9y agoIt doesn't: the GP didn't mention any scintillation. My aura was similar to their description. I would be reading, and the words before or after the current one would be gone. I figured it was the migraine disrupting the visual processing parts of the brain so much so that the automatic filling in of the blind spot stopped working.
- platz 9y agoI thought the blind spot was out near the periphery of your vision , not near the center
- petercooper 9y agoThis is like a written version of how I seem to hear other people. Even when actively listening, I frequently hear different words (whatever my brain wants to hear or is predicting it heard, perhaps) which I question and generally find I heard wrong.
- hueving 9y agoHave you had your hearing checked? This can be a side effect of your brain attempting to make up for hearing loss.
- petercooper 9y agoI'm going to be doing that, yes, as I'm not getting any younger :-D
- mproud 9y agoThe comments are GOLDEN! Read the back-and-forth about the definition of bravery, from “Ben Tarr” and the rest of the commenters.
- gnicholas 9y ago> There are three proposed cognitive subtypes of dyslexia (auditory, visual and attentional) In the US, unfortunately, many experts focus exclusively on the phonological aspects of dyslexia (which corresponds to the "auditory" description above). In other parts of the world, the understanding is broader and includes visual aspects also. It seems that the narrower, U.S.-based conception of dyslexia goes back to some research done at Yale in 1996 [1], which is often summarized as "dyslexia is phonological, not visual". Because Americans have such a high opinion of Yale, educators/experts here like to parrot this sound bite, even if they don't fully understand the research or competing research conclusions. Researchers and experts outside the U.S. have a different view (and IMO are less influenced by a research report from Yale). I have been especially curious about the visual impacts of dyslexia, because the technology I work [2] on is visual, and according to many people with dyslexia, it is extraordinarily helpful for them. Having heard repeatedly that "dyslexia is not visual", I was curious to know why a visual technology would have a materially beneficial effect for readers with dyslexia. In conversations with dyslexia researchers, I have learned that there may be second-order effects of dyslexia that are visual — even if the root causes of dyslexia are not visual. Basically, people with dyslexia dislike reading and therefore do not read much. This causes them to lag on a number of reading-related skills, including visual tracking. Since visual aids can improve visual tracking, they can help readers with dyslexia, even if they don't have a type of dyslexia that was originally caused by visual differences. 1: http://dyslexia.yale.edu/Scientific_American_1996.pdf http://dyslexia.yale.edu/Scientific_American_1996.pdf 2: http://www.BeeLineReader.com http://www.BeeLineReader.com
- walshemj 9y agoThat's interesting in the UK I was diagnosed early 70's with dyslexia by my optician - who had an interest in the subject.
- gnicholas 9y agoYeah, opticians here in the U.S. would just focus on glasses/contacts. Dyslexia diagnoses here generally comes from school psychologists or literacy specialists. The standards vary — in some places it is very difficult to be diagnosed, and in other places it is very easy.
- Gusbenz 9y agoI have Dyslexia. It's not like this bullshit. I think this kind of crap propagates more misunderstanding.
- robmcm 9y agoThe experience isn't the same, but I think the affect on someone without it would be similar. In essence, it would take them a lot longer (or at a higher cognitive tax) to intemperate a page of text.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoWhat if it is like this, but for different people? A single case of Dyslexia isn't necessarily representative.
- zamalek 9y agoI honestly think that dyslexia is a range of undiagnosed conditions. It's nothing like the simulation for me, but it's not the first time I've heard of letters jumping around.
- technothrasher 9y agoDyslexia simply means having trouble learning to read. Being diagnosed with dyslexia does not give any indication as to the cause of the dyslexia. The formal definition in the DSM-5 is: "a pattern of learning difficulties characterized by problems with accurate or fluent word recognition, poor decoding, and poor spelling abilities."
- umanwizard 9y agoWhat is it like for you ?
- popcorncolonel 9y agoIt's for sure different for different people.
- lasermike026 9y agoThis really makes the point. Perhaps exploring different pathways would help. Braille? Audio? Different colors or fonts?
- jasonkester 9y agoThat's not what it's like for me. I simply can't tell the difference between symbols that have been rotated or reversed. So I made it through an engineering degree with "the alligator eats the bigger number" mnemonics for > and <. The first thing I do when I get a new dev machine is take a pen and write "\r\n" up above the delete key. I've never gotten the slashes in the right direction on that key sequence from memory even though I type them several times a day (I just had to edit my post after looking it up right now and realizing I'd typed it wrong on my new laptop). Anything that can be reversed, I reverse roughly 50% of the time. Because to my brain, they're interchangeable.
- yoz-y 9y agoIt sounds like it would be helpful if the symbols we use for writing were unambiguous even if rotated or reversed? Do you use some special fonts that help with symbols such as > and <, b and d and so on?
- jasonkester 9y agoNah, it's not really a big deal. I've never considered it as holding me back or anything. Apart from having to fix the occasional unescaped character in a string, it doesn't have any meaningful effect on my life.
- SeanLuke 9y agoThis is interesting. Is it both rotated or reversed? Because your < > example, and your \ / example, can be defined as either one. So for example: - Do you have problems disambiguating P and d? - Do you have problems disambiguating d and b?
- jasonkester 9y agoProbably just reversed. I always got my J's backwards as a kid, but never upside down. If I have an external visual queue I can use, I'm good to go. That's what made the >< thing work. I got the intersection/union symbols down because union happens to both look like and start with a U.
- kuwze 9y agoI have no clue if this works (I have not been diagnosed as dyslexic) but it certainly makes things more readable for me: https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/
- O_H_E 9y agoThat's strange !!!
- gnicholas 9y agoOpenDyslexic also has more space between letters and words, which makes reading easier for some. But for others, the increased space is too much, and it actually makes it harder. One other benefit of OpenDyslexic is that it is a very "heavy" font. If you're struggling to read something in Helvetica Neue, switching to any heavier font would make it easier to read.
- bArray 9y agoI assume I'm Dyslexic (never got tested for various reasons), but I experience what I have in a different way to this. When reading sentences I sometimes read the words in the wrong order, completely changing the meaning of the sentence at times. The way to describe my experience is that when you read sentences, you are sometimes surprised by what you read because it seems wrong, re-read it and find out that's not what it said at all. The correction I might possibly make on this site would be to have webcam input and change only when your eyes are not looking at something and to make the change more subtle so you're not aware of it in your peripheral vision. Day-to-day (not big) issues are: * Having to re-read paragraphs because I read it wrong and therefore failed to understand it. * Coming unstuck in a point I'm making because I failed to read the text correctly. * Some fonts I really cannot read at any speed - basically if it differs too much from very standard computer fonts. * Given up writing lowercase in my own handwriting because I cannot easily read it - the workaround for me was to write completely in capitals. * Generally wanting to avoid reading because of the above issues. Benefits: * Able to spot mistakes in large bodies of text really quickly, but equally could be a result of just being a programmer. * Skim reading is easier because I have gotten used to getting words in the wrong order anyway, which almost the same as missing words. Also, I find it funny that one test for whether you are dreaming is reading sentences in your dream doesn't make sense - I get this anyway :) Proof we are living in the matrix? ;) Interested to hear if anybody else also experiences this and can even enlighten me a bit.
- Posibyte 9y agoI also do this. Sometimes it feels like I can't slow myself down and I read too fast, grabbing words, but putting them in the wrong order in my head. Sometimes I also write words out of order, or skip words completely when trying to dictate onto paper. As a child I had a pretty severe stutter which is not as pronounced now, and the feeling I got from that is the same feeling I get now as an adult with my reading. I've not experienced the dream one, at least in any way that I can remember. I tend not to dream in general however. And just like your second bullet point, on several occasions I've approved written material that was quite poor because my brain filled in the blanks with what I thought sounded nice :)
- 9y ago
- chrismatheson 9y agoHi, bit of a shameless plug, but I've been working with my dad and some dyslexia experts for the last 5 years and we have made http://www.unitsofsound.com/ http://www.unitsofsound.com/ If anyone wants to check it out that would be awesome. On the subject, my dad and I are dyslexic, and this course (in a different form) has helped immeasurably. We also have a couple of experts on the subject area that I can put anyone in touch with if they have any questions, please reach out info@unitsofsound.com
- paulpauper 9y agoDoes dyslexia mean the letters are jumbled or is it just a difficulty reading fast and and poor comprehension?
- okket 9y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11218677 (1.5 years ago, 200 comments)
- symbolepro 9y agoSeeing this, I remember an Indian movie Tare Zameen Par (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taare_Zameen_Par https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taare_Zameen_Par). The film explores the life and imagination of Ishaan, an 8-year-old dyslexic child.
- k__ 9y agolol, doesn't seem to hard. Words are still easily readable with the middle letters mixed up.
- kkotak 9y agoI wonder how dyslexia affects people from non-english speaking world.
- danellis 9y agoI wonder how it affects people from China and other non-alphabet-using countries.
- osteele 9y agoThe reading task involves a number of subtasks. If any of these don't work well, it's “dyslexia”. Different dyslexics have different symptoms and experiences depending on what part of the pipeline is affected how. I'm not surprised that a web page designed to simulate one person's experience doesn't match others'. For an accessible but informative intro-level text, I recommend _Psychology of Reading_, by Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, and Clifton. (I took intro grad-level cognitive psychology from Rayner and Pollatsek.) One anecdote I remember from the first edition involved a subject who couldn't perform left-to-right saccades; she was dyslexic in English, but wouldn't have been in Hebrew or Arabic.
- keithpeter 9y agoThanks for reference, just ordered the 2nd edition. "Different dyslexics have different symptoms and experiences depending on what part of the pipeline is affected how" One student that I worked with a couple of years ago talked of the words jumping and changing size on the stark white page. She had lilac coloured paper for handouts &c. OA has been added to my teacher-training list of pages.
- Method-X 9y agoThis is a good representation of what my dyslexia is like: http://bin.ddai.us/dys/lib/textjumble.png http://bin.ddai.us/dys/lib/textjumble.png I describe it like reading through a straw. I can only focus on one word at a time, while most people can take in more words at once. Consequently, my reading speed is much slower than most. Oddly, it hasn't affected my ability to code; I can "see" code just fine.
- sannee 9y agoI have always imagined that dyslexia feels somewhat like mild dose of LSD. It's hard to describe, but the letters usually seem to move around (especially in peripheral vision) and one has to focus mostly on individual symbols making up a word instead of the usual words-magically-appearing-in-brain stuff.
- memsom 9y agoI'm mildly dyslexic. I sometimes read words incorrectly - so for example a local hill is called "Butser", but I frequently will read "Buster" as I drive past. So I find I read slowly aloud, because I need to process the text before I can speak it. It doesn't happen frequently anymore, but I do still get it. It's amazingly frustrating. Weirdest thing - I can read that website pretty easily. I can see the words. I think it's because I look for more markers than just the word shape when I read. I don't know. How do others find it?
- peter303 9y agoAfter a few years of reading many people recognize words in their entirety, not as individual letters. They note the length, parts with upward extenders such as bdhk, descenders like gjp and rounded parts etc. This is akin to reading ideographs. I wonder how this interacts with dyslexia?
- moopling 9y agoPretty cool to see that the the scripts are no exception. If you look at the script tags within the inspect the code is also being reordered
- ergothus 9y agoAs far as I know, I don't have dyslexia. I've always been a voracious reader and haven't had the challenges one normally associates with the label. But now and then - maybe once a month, maybe a few days in a row, some normal, easy, word will look _wrong_. The letters don't "jump around", but it looks wrong the way a missplelled word does...I end up staring at it and trying to imagine how it SHOULD be spelled. That'd be less weird for me if it was a word with lots of typical english weirdness, like "necessary", but this happens on really _simple_ words, and usually just one word at any moment. Then later, that particular word stops doing it. In recent history I can recall this happening with: "tree", "the", "matter", and (ironically) "simple", but I've never noticed any pattern to which words do it, and these are words that only do this for a few minutes or hours, then stop. "the" just looked as wrong as "teh" normally looks wrong, and every instance on the page looks like a glaring error until it subsides. Does anyone know what does this? It's not a notable problem for me - because these are simple words that I have a lot of familiarity with I can just logically override the emotional component, but it still weirds me out. What else can my brain do this with, making something normal and mundane wrong and alien for a brief period? FWIW, English is my native language.
- yladiz 9y agoI think what you're referring to is semantic satiation[1], where you hear or see a word often enough that it becomes essentially gibberish and you can't parse it properly. As far as I know I'm not dyslexic but it happens to me sporadically too, but it generally fixes itself within a few minutes. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
- Baeocystin 9y ago>and these are words that only do this for a few minutes or hours, then stop Some neuron died, and it takes a while for the RAID 5 of the mind to rebuild the array. I'm only half-joking. I know exactly the feeling you're talking about, and it's the just-so reason I came up with to amuse myself. Realistically, it probably a relative of semantic satiation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
- yladiz 9y agoSeeing this helped me gain a real appreciation for the effects of dyslexia that being told how it is hasn't, even if it's not truly accurate to how everyone is affected by it. Seeing this has made me curious about how dyslexia affects non-English/Latin alphabet readers too, e.g. Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Arabic, Thai. Is there someone on here that has dyslexia and reads/writes in these scripts that can explain how it affects them? For example, in Korean do the pieces of each individual phoneme move around in ways that don't make sense, e.g. ㄷㅏㄴ normally is 단 but the ㄷ and ㅏ switch places? Or in Chinese, do the strokes within each character move around, or do the characters simply move positions within the phrase?
- yingxiong 9y agoI am not sure how Chinese readers with dyslexia perceive, but there is an amusing phenomenon that a similar trick, i.e., shuffling Chinese characters within a sentence, has little to no effect in making reading harder.
- dnprock 9y agoI've got this book reading app with AI assistant. I wonder if it'll help with dyslexia. Would love to hear from others. http://book.vidalab.co/ http://book.vidalab.co/
- neom 9y agoFor me the "movement" part is basically my mind trying to process 2D object in 3D space. They "jump" because somewhere back there, my mind is trying to show me what the glyph would look like if it was in front of me floating. This is why b and d are hard, etc. Sufficed to say, mine is nothing like this website.
- _jn 9y agoI'd be interested in seeing is how syllable splits (for ex·am·ple, with mid·dots like this) affect reading comprehension for dyslexics.
- somethingabout 9y agoThis is not real or true. I have dyslexia and have never seen text like that. I have no trouble seeing letters or words, I just can't associate the sounds with the letters, so I can't spell or read new words (based on the sounds). I've dealt with it by remembering tons of words.
- kibwen 9y agoI recently learned of a related condition, called dyscalculia, which is to mathematics as dyslexia is to reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia
- cliffweitzman11 9y agoI'm dyslexic and built a tool to solve this issue for me: https://getspeechify.com/ https://getspeechify.com/ basically it lets your computer read out any text to you super easily. Even if letters are hard to decode visually, they are easy to listen to. And it takes very little time to build up the ability to listen super fast so I listen between 500 and 600 words per minute.
- XR0CSWV3h3kZWg 9y agoI have relatively mild symptoms of dyslexia, they obviously don't present like this. The real problems came when I tried to connect letters and words with sounds. Once that came it was easy to read, and has been ever since. I barely even remember struggling with reading, but spelling and pronunciation has always been a ordeal. My symptoms only present themselves during production or consumption. I have no confusion between left and right in my head, I rarely get them mixed up. But it took me forever to be able to tell people which word connected to which side.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y agoIs there a standard test for dyslexia? Are there any proven methods by which to address these learning to read difficulties? As dyslexics, did you feel that having the label helped you or hurt you as a young person?
- callesgg 9y agoNot an accurate feeling of reading, but the general idea is about accurate.
- jaksmit 9y agothis example is extremely over generalized. Dyslexia comes in different forms and can manifest through a varience in ability on a scale of things, including math ability, remembering a sequence of numbers backwards etc. not everyone who is dyslexic has impairments with regards to seeing symbols order reading. I'm diagnosed as dyslexic but don't experience any of what's described here.
- wessorh 9y agoIf you are Dyslexic and an Entrapunuer and live in the bay area, consider joining NED the Dyslexic Entrapunuer Network. See denlaunch.com I really enjoyed meeting a bunch of other dyslexic folks and I'd never really met any others. Bets part of a NED meeting is no one will ask you to take notes :)
- CurtMonash 9y agoI was a reading prodigy (full ability to read adult material before age 3), with astronomical IQ scores to match (higher than what Marilyn vos Savant had in Guinness). Even so, I think I was/am mildly dyslexic. Clearly, if it's real it's mild, and not much of a disability. Still: -- It took me several years after I learned to read to stop mixing up letters and their reversed forms (e.g. lower-case b/d). -- I still have to think hard to avoid mixing up east/west in many map-reading situations. -- (Don't know if this is relevant) I always have had great difficulty identifying the direction a sound is coming from. I also generally have difficulty memorizing visual details, recognizing faces, etc.