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excalidraw / excalidraw

Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams
https://excalidraw.com
MIT License
80.56k stars 7.41k forks source link

Add dyslexia-friendly (default?) font #4206

Open khs26 opened 2 years ago

khs26 commented 2 years ago

Excalidraw looks excellent and was recently featured on Hacker News. However, I wanted to bring your attention to this top comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109995

I genuinely can't stand the default font, and so many people tend to use it. My dyslexia makes it really difficult for me to read it. Please, please, Excalidraw owners if you're reading this: make the default font something that's much more friendly to those with dyslexia.

Defaults matter a lot.

I'm not dyslexic myself, so I'm afraid I can't do any user testing. There are a number of resources available to offer guidance and hopefully they help! Two of the top picks from Google:

aisbergde commented 2 years ago

I have no dyslexia, but the one and only font is very hard to read for me. For me it is even hard to read my own hand writing and it is always much harder to read hand writing of other people. And I really don't like any kinda hand written like fonts, because it is so terrible complicated to extract just the content.

A few weeks ago the first time I was presented some collaboration process using excalidraw, and the first question which came in my mind was: "Why do they use this terrible hard to read hand written font for a complicated technical documentation, where colum names should be monospace and other text should just be readable?" Later I asked and I was told, there is no other font.

It's hard enough when you have to work together in a foreign language (English). Then you want to at least visually understand what it's all about. So I feel when reading such quasi handwritten diagrams like I feel when I have to talk on the phone with other people in English, whose native language is not that either. I have to concentrate extremely hard and still don't understand everything that I can easily understand in a written communication with legible fonts.

Would it be possible to add more flexibility for the font?

aisbergde commented 2 years ago

I just have seen, it is possible to change the font to a normal font. So this was just a wrong information, that they told my, there is only handwriting font.

It looks like they didn't explore this.

Then I have a question: is it possible to change the font from handwriting to normal for all text objects in the drawing at once?

[updated] I found the context menu, when long pressing (I use the Android app), there is "select all", and a "raster". I have to say: I am very impressed about excalidraw. It looks like it is much easier to use than some other tools. And I should use it in meetings. Thank you for this great software!