There three possible things we can do in the editor to support people with dyslexia
Synchronized highlighting with speech. This already an issue (#89)
Color code the math
Use special fonts
Capturing what I learned from the 2018 code sprint...
Color coding
I spoke with Jennifer Larson and she wrote up some examples:
Sina and I tried to get some rules out of her for implementation. Here are some notes:
Bold the numbers that can be decoded as a same symbol
Symbols that can be conflated with one another must be opposite colors.
These are: 3/8, 6/9, 2/5, maybe 1/7 depending on font
Green, Red, bright blue, for numbers -- look up what brain science says is the best for differentiation
If out of colors, one of the pair can be black.
Numbers inside parens need contrasting colors (??? --need to ask about this)
"Negative" is always bold and colored bright orange. In general, any preceeding unary operator should be bold and colored
parens and equals are dark colors.
First level parens are dark gray, nested parens need a "alert" colors (orange for text). Nesting level should have contrast and be bold. Use different colors.
background colors should be florescent pink, yellow, green
Maybe add extra horizontal spacing
Maybe use a larger font
Things that are smaller (sup, superscripts, index) should use highlights
Operators are not colored, except:
Fraction lines are dark gray and bold
Abs value lines are bold and red
Adobe has a color picker for contrasting and complementary colors that might be good to fine tune the colors.
Jennifer later added in email:
When a child (with multiple LD’s is learning a new concept- example - - PEMDAS- then its important to layer the color coding. If possible to make these layers or options something to turn off or on.
Layer one would be - color code everything - what was broken down today with the rules.
Layer two - would be to just color code the operation symbols (+, x, - and the division symbol etc. )
We find that once a child is in the rhythm of the problem sets and they are just practicing them for retention, then not all the colors of the numbers are needed.
Fonts
Early research suggested that specialized fonts for dyslexia were good. Later research questioned this. Here are two papers with info (for reference):
johnhbenetech
commented
6 years ago
Problem
There three possible things we can do in the editor to support people with dyslexia
Capturing what I learned from the 2018 code sprint...
Color coding
I spoke with Jennifer Larson and she wrote up some examples:
Sina and I tried to get some rules out of her for implementation. Here are some notes:
Adobe has a color picker for contrasting and complementary colors that might be good to fine tune the colors.
Jennifer later added in email: When a child (with multiple LD’s is learning a new concept- example - - PEMDAS- then its important to layer the color coding. If possible to make these layers or options something to turn off or on.
We find that once a child is in the rhythm of the problem sets and they are just practicing them for retention, then not all the colors of the numbers are needed.
Fonts
Early research suggested that specialized fonts for dyslexia were good. Later research questioned this. Here are two papers with info (for reference):
Aha! Link: https://diagramlabs.aha.io/features/B-339