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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

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.

ludamad 6y ago
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
caymanjim 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
disordinary 6y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  I recall that being debunked. Where the real effect was just “you have two letters that are correct so the corruption of each word is just much lower”
  - wolco 6y ago
    I will debunk your debunk.
  - buran77 6y ago
    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: something [original] stnhioemg [1st/last] msgethion [4th-7th] gnmethios [3rd-7th] gnihtemos [reverse spelling]
- Sharlin 6y ago
  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.
FuckButtons 6y ago
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.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  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.
  - Milner08 6y ago
    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.
    - Jaruzel 6y ago
      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.
GeekyBear 6y ago
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. Yet somehow, I'm also a speed reader.
- ache7 6y ago
  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.
  - GeekyBear 6y ago
    My mother made scrapbooks for my siblings and I with samples of our schoolwork over the years. If you go back and look at early examples of my handwriting, every "S" was backwards, my b and d were often flipped the wrong way, as were my p and q. My spelling was atrocious, but my vocabulary was way above average. I also had the issue with transposing numbers while doing math. It wasn't until I reached High School that I had a teacher who recognized dyslexia when he saw it.
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      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.
      - rags2riches 6y ago
        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.
tomcooks 6y ago
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
- ianbooker 6y ago
  I am curious: When you 'zoom' in on a single word and read it letter by letter: Is that still happening?
  - tomcooks 6y ago
    Not really, but it's hard to keep track of the whole sentence and general meaning by keeping the speed slow. The open dyslexic font helps a lot, (pity it's fugly)[https://www.opendyslexic.org/about https://www.opendyslexic.org/about]. Very little problems with monospace, even at 6-10px
thaumasiotes 6y ago
> 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. http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/word-jumble-hoax-debunked https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/word...
- Bedon292 6y ago
  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.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    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
WA 6y ago
The longer and more difficult words are, the harder it becomes. Or what does this mean? cmisorepenohn
- Hinrik 6y ago
  comprehension
hnlmorg 6y ago
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).
- eyko 6y ago
  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.
  - red2awn 6y ago
    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. Also, NGINX is pronounced "engine X".
    - rodw 6y ago
simias 6y ago
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. That's pure guesswork on my part though.
- patmorgan23 6y ago
  I think you're heading in the right direction. Im dyslexic and it definitely took me longer to get to the point that i could read quickly.
- Clownfused 6y ago
  I agree but would also add that at least in my experience difficulty with decoding is the root cause where fluency is a symptom.
limaoscarjuliet 6y ago
Plus, likely, there is no one dyslexia. There is a wide spectrum from mild to severe. Would be nice to add "hardnesss" slider to the website.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Really, how much did you read? 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!
- caymanjim 6y ago
  You're right, it's harder on very long, unfamiliar words (especially technical terms). I do have to reread some of those, and it slows me down.
chooseaname 6y ago
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.
umvi 6y ago
> With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read I did too, at first. But with the longer words it was impossible unless you already knew the word, like typoglycemia (a word I didn't already know).
Elof 6y ago
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.

ludamad 6y ago

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

caymanjim 6y ago

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.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

disordinary 6y ago

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.

Waterluvian 6y ago
I recall that being debunked. Where the real effect was just “you have two letters that are correct so the corruption of each word is just much lower”
- wolco 6y ago
  I will debunk your debunk.
- buran77 6y ago
  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: something [original] stnhioemg [1st/last] msgethion [4th-7th] gnmethios [3rd-7th] gnihtemos [reverse spelling]
Sharlin 6y ago
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.

FuckButtons 6y ago

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.

caymanjim 6y ago
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.
- Milner08 6y ago
  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.
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    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.

GeekyBear 6y ago

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. Yet somehow, I'm also a speed reader.

ache7 6y ago
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.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  My mother made scrapbooks for my siblings and I with samples of our schoolwork over the years. If you go back and look at early examples of my handwriting, every "S" was backwards, my b and d were often flipped the wrong way, as were my p and q. My spelling was atrocious, but my vocabulary was way above average. I also had the issue with transposing numbers while doing math. It wasn't until I reached High School that I had a teacher who recognized dyslexia when he saw it.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    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.
    - rags2riches 6y ago
      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.

tomcooks 6y ago

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

ianbooker 6y ago
I am curious: When you 'zoom' in on a single word and read it letter by letter: Is that still happening?
- tomcooks 6y ago
  Not really, but it's hard to keep track of the whole sentence and general meaning by keeping the speed slow. The open dyslexic font helps a lot, (pity it's fugly)[https://www.opendyslexic.org/about https://www.opendyslexic.org/about]. Very little problems with monospace, even at 6-10px

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> 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. http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/personal/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/word-jumble-hoax-debunked https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/fontblog/word...

Bedon292 6y ago
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.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  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

WA 6y ago

The longer and more difficult words are, the harder it becomes. Or what does this mean? cmisorepenohn

Hinrik 6y ago
comprehension

hnlmorg 6y ago

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).

eyko 6y ago
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.
- red2awn 6y ago
  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. Also, NGINX is pronounced "engine X".
  - rodw 6y ago

simias 6y ago

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. That's pure guesswork on my part though.

patmorgan23 6y ago
I think you're heading in the right direction. Im dyslexic and it definitely took me longer to get to the point that i could read quickly.
Clownfused 6y ago
I agree but would also add that at least in my experience difficulty with decoding is the root cause where fluency is a symptom.

limaoscarjuliet 6y ago

Plus, likely, there is no one dyslexia. There is a wide spectrum from mild to severe. Would be nice to add "hardnesss" slider to the website.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Really, how much did you read? 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!

caymanjim 6y ago
You're right, it's harder on very long, unfamiliar words (especially technical terms). I do have to reread some of those, and it slows me down.

chooseaname 6y ago

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.

umvi 6y ago

> With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read I did too, at first. But with the longer words it was impossible unless you already knew the word, like typoglycemia (a word I didn't already know).

Elof 6y ago

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.