Reading different languages

Comments

• SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I sustained damage to my macular last year and switched my kindle font to open dyslexic (as well as make the text larger and more spaced out) after reading became harder. That font helped to “anchor” the words down, particularly in the middle of my vision. Someone suggested a hyperlegible font which works almost as well but is better looking. From my very limited experience, I find the Cyrillic alphabet harder to read than the Roman alphabet - but that could just be my lack of familiarity with it. I learnt a little Ukrainian but only using duolingo.

  I don’t know if this little nugget of info might help you, but years ago I was doing a PhD in psycholinguistics. I vaguely remember that different fonts can have an effect on comprehension and recall. I briefly considered an experiment to see if stuttering could be induced by different scripts. That was a long time ago though, I don’t know if that’s still the accepted case.

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  • nandeEbisu@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m a lifelong stutterer, I definitely noticed, especially in school when we had to read aloud, that I stuttered more when reading. I assumed it was more of a self fulfilling prophecy where I would get tense anticipating stuttering while reading so it happened, but would be interested in seeing if research around fonts ended up bearing any fruit.

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    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I was able to show that people who stutter “stutter” when they read silently, as well as reading aloud! Although pressure/stress also makes stuttering worse, as you said.

      That anticipation you mentioned - it’s called your phonological loop. It’s a cognitive process that happens subconsciously when we form words in our heads before speaking or as we’re reading. One school of thought about the cause of stuttering (and what my research supported) was that people who stutter are over vigilant in their phonological loop. Everyone analyses their speech before it’s articulated to a certain extent, but people who stutter seem to over analyse it like they’re almost expecting an error due to their stutter. That over analysis increases cognitive load and makes you even more likely to stutter; a self fulfilling prophecy, as you said.

      I’ll take a look at my literature review later if I get a chance - I’ll let you know if I can find a paper about the effect of fonts.

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  • seaQueue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Have you played with basic layout like line spacing, left justified vs full justification, increased spacing between paragraphs etc? There’s pretty good data that all of those increase readability and reading speed by giving you more features on the page to anchor on.

    I’m not visually impaired (not more than the average for my age anyway) but I saw a significant reading speed and comfort increase when I implemented all of those recommendations alongside a comfortably readable font. I imagine they’d work well with Open Dyslexic or a hyperlegible font too.

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    • SomeoneElse@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Yep, increasing the text size helped a little, but adjusting the spacing, alignment and margins helped a lot. I keep the margins thin/small, the alignment left justified and the spacing moderate-wide. Those adjustments plus the more legible font has made reading almost as easy as before my eyesight was damaged. I do have to focus more though, or the words/letters in the centre of my vision go walkabout!

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• andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I feel like the difference between symbols matters. Fonts to read with fingers are made from dots because it’s 0\1, dot or no dot, for fingers are pretty much like an eye with a very limited sight, they would have trouble discerning 6 and G, M and N. When languages like Ukrainian or Russian use similarly shaped letters i\ï or е\ё, they become confusing, as this 10% of information in dots decides what the letter means. Like a QR code, they should have enough ways of correcting the coded message even if you lose a part of image or misread it. When my eyes are tired, sans serif fonts read better than serif ones, fonts making letters like g unique by pronouncing it’s hanging loop are easier, and the less dublicate letters the better.

  I found this link if you haven’t seen it: fonts.google.com/…/readability_and_accessibility It sounds like it fits your question.

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• pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  mabye Mongolian script is most readable mabye try it for visually impaired people

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• Rentlar@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  You can read up on Japanese Braille: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Braille

  The system itself is pretty simple and is like hiragana/katakana. To do Kanji there are 6dot and 8dot versions which makes it a bit more complicated.

  Something I wanted to ask somebody who’s familiar with interfaces for visually impaired: On Lemmy, does an inline picture with a caption display what would be the link text as an alt text? For example, can a screen reader this:

  Hello, you are viewing a photograph of an apple

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  • SomeRandomWords@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I haven’t personally tested this, so this is all an assumption because of how related things work.

    On the web app for Lemmy, alternative text should be called out instead of the image (well, alongside since it lets you know there’s an image with alt text). When you use an image as the text of a link (so, what is normally a clickable image) it should call out that it’s a link, then that the link is an image, then that the image has alt text. This is not dissimilar to how things work if the image won’t load and the alt text is shown instead.

    On mobile apps it’s the wild west, almost entirely depending on if the app developers put in the additional effort to make all of that information available to screen readers. By default not a whole lot is given other than the text itself so images are often completely skipped or called out without the alt text.

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