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Bionic reading vs dyslexic font? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/dyslexia@sopuli.xyz
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I love my open-dyslexic font on my Kobo. I read a lot, usually many hours while in bed late at night. I don't think the font helps with my reading speed at all, but I just feel like I have less fatigue and I have to reread words and sentences less often (I often mistakenly assume a word or few words and then get confused why the sentence made no sense).

Anyway, I just saw a demo of bionic reading and it feels weird and fast. I instantly was gonna pay for a font, but according to my research it doesn't really work on Kobo. The fonts just left-weight letters, but the actual bolding for eye-focus points has to modify epubs themselves. I guess on the xteink x4 (which I was thinking about buying) you can put custom firmware on that supports render-time bionic reading, but Kobo doesn't allow anything like that.

So before I buy anything or waste any time converting epubs, I was wondering if anyone had any experience with both, and which they prefer? I think theoretically I could modify an epub with bionic reading and use my open-dyslexic font at the same time... I guess there isn't much research suggesting either help readers, and bionic reading doesn't seem to have been tested for dyslexics specifically at all.

I might give it a try tonight either way. I'll report back if I do.

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[–] 19 points 5 months ago (4 children)

This is supposed to work? I find it distracting and intrusive. I swear I could feel a headache coming on from just that snippet.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah if I try to read it word for word it's headache inducing. Once I got the purpose of it, scanning the text instead of trying to read it normally worked surprisingly well

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    But I don't understand how skimming text at ultraspeed is supposed to increase comprehension and depth of understanding like the blurb says. It's rather the opposite effect.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I don't either. Maybe it helps some people. My best guess is that for some, they may not know what a sentence or word is supposed to mean until they have the whole context, but in this manner, they can quickly gather all the needed context clues and decipher what it means.

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    • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Disclaimer: I don’t have dyslexia.

    This was absolutely wild for me. I started reading the first few words at a normal speed then felt almost a compulsion to speed read the rest of the text. It was almost like I lost some control and my brain was forced to read it at hyper speed. I have no idea if this would help or hurt someone with dyslexia but it was definitely an interesting thing to experience. Thanks for posting this!

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    • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    Yeah I can read that several times faster than normal but it also kinda feels unpleasant to read too fast.

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    [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I'm very interested to hear others' experience on this. I don't have dyslexia but I've tried a few different things in the hope of increasing my effective reading speed, with limited results.

    There's an open-source font that follows the same general idea as Bionic. I've tried this on my e-reader and it works fine: https://github.com/Born2Root/Fast-Font

    The coolest part of that project is that they have instructions for how to apply the bolding logic to ANY font. So in theory you could apply it to Open-Dyslexic. I've never actually tried this but if there's interest I could give it a go, since it seems to be within my skill set.

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    • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    I think I read like this already.

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    [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Might be interesting to compare reading time with Comic Sans.

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    [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    It looks horrible, but it works really well

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