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Web accessibility and dyslexia

Beez Fedia on June 23, 2020

“Once freed from archaic schooling practices and preconceptions, my mind opened up. Out in the real world, my dyslexia became my massive advantage...
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Beez Fedia • Edited

I should probably add that justified text also causes a number of problems for dyslexic people. It's best to simply left-align text.

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Michael Fasani

I was tested for Dyslexia as a child and the test came back negative but I have some issues which still plague me till today. I really dislike justified text.

If what you say is correct then these concerns could be suggested to the above organizations and that data/info should be included.

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Polly

Good to know! Thanks for the tip.

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Beez Fedia

You're welcome!

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Danny Michaelis

Thank you for pointing this out. It's always nice to hear others talk about Dyslexia here. I've resorted to using the browser's native text-to-speech/SpeechSynthesis API for most things. Though it is a wretched API. Have you come across any TTS solutions?

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Beez Fedia

Nothing better that I'm aware of I'm afraid. There are some out-of-browser solutions, such as Google Cloud Text-to-Speech, Amazon Polly or Microsoft Azure (Cognitive Services Text-to-Speech). They take more setup although AWS Amplify makes using Amazon Polly less time consuming through its Text-to-Speech library.

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Elliot

I'll add that there are fonts which are designed to be readable for those who have dyslexia! dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/

If you go into the settings of your DEV.to account there is even an option to use a dyslexia-helping font! I think it's awesome that DEV thought about that. Even if you don't have dyslexia, it's worth changing your font in the settings for a bit, just to get a sense of what it's like so you can empathize with dyslexic users :)

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Beez Fedia

Thanks Elliot, I didn't know about this !

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Adam Crockett 🌀

Every programmer I tell about my being dyslexic, seems to not be surprised but instead they are also dyslexic! It's quite funny.

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Beez Fedia

Yeah, it's way more common than I thought, plus it gives you superpowers.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

How many of the global population are programmers? Would be an interesting stat overlay to have a potential number of dyslexic programmers.

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CassiopeiaSky

Love this!

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Beez Fedia