Slashdot Mirror
Free Font Helps People With Dyslexia
Thornburg writes "There is a free font available which has been designed to make it easier for people with dyslexia to read. DailyTech has a piece which pulls together a BBC interview and blog postings by the designer, Abelardo Gonzalez, who received a C&D letter from another font designer who charges $69 for his dyslexia related font."
Never thought I had dyslexia, never imagined I had problems reading, but holy crap reading a page in anti-dyslexia fonts like this one http://www.pixelscript.net/gilldyslexic/ is like all the words leap off the page making sudden sense in an instant.
*random expression of surprise at finding something new at age 44*
No more comic sans? Please?
I'm pretty severely dyslexic, and I just plain cannot read his website in that font. The weird shading from top to bottom makes it look like it's been printed on a daisywheel with the platen out of alignment.
It's so hard to read I had to turn off the stylesheet to make my way through the page.
I'm torn on this. On the one hand, the OpenDyslexic guy specifically states he intended his project to infringe on the other Dyslexic fonts.
On the other hand, This Christian Boer guy comes across as having tried to stake a claim on the very idea of using a weighted font to combat Dyslexia.
On the, er, foot, the comparison image [apathyonline.net] that Boer shows off does have quite a few similarities. And beyond merely the "well duh, they're the same letters" level of similarities.
On the er, other foot, Holy cow, did not know that you cannot copyright a font. That explains all those $10 CDs with 5000 fonts on them and the like. I presume this means I can go find a copy of WildWord for free online instead of having to pay $TEXAS to replace the old digital download files I lost back in the day?
Your typeface doesn't look the same as his typeface. You can't copyright typefaces, and they're all derivative.
Typically what Adobe does is trademark the name, so there are many Palladins or Pallertrino's and the like, but only one Palatino (tm Adobe/Linotype).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino
What Mr Boer is trying to do, is to bully competitors in an effort to block competition. This is not unusual. The world is full of little shits like this. You have to learn to get a thicker skin against them and just ignore him.
see, that's were the misunderstanding lies: wikipedia summarises quite well:
Under U.S. law, typefaces and the characters they contain are considered to be utilitarian objects whose utility outweighs any merit that may exist in protecting their creative elements. Typefaces are exempt from copyright protection in the United States (Code of Federal Regulations, Ch 37, Sec. 202.1(e); Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer). However, this finding was limited in Adobe Systems, Inc. v. Southern Software, Inc., wherein it was held that scalable computer fonts, i.e., the instructions necessary to render a typeface, constitute a "computer program" for the purposes of copyright law and hence are subject to protection. Hence the computer file(s) associated with a scalable font will generally be protected even though the specific design of the characters is not.
So in the US I would assume Boers has not claim, but you still can not distribute those CDs :)
The typeface design isn't copyrightable, the specification of that typeface *is* copyrightable. This is like saying a classical piece of music isn't copyrightable, but a recording of the BBC Symphonic Orchestra playing the classical piece *is*.
So if you printed and traced the typeface, even if the design is identical, as long as the control points, rendering hints etc. aren't the same it's not an infringement. The font file is different, the copyrightable parts are different.
Then to Christian Boers 'moral' claim.
Christian Boer certainly based his Dyslexia typeface on other typefaces and he has no more moral claim to it than you do. He did exactly what you did, took an existing typeface and played with it. Only he used the work of other for his personal profit, not for a good cause. So his claim is morally lower than yours.
He's a parasite, he copies others work, then claims special rights to it. Unlike Apple's he's capable of fooling lots of people, he'll just go away and good riddance to him.
... that frivolous sending of cease-and-desist letters would become illegal.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Look up SLAPP - Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation. A number of states now have anti-SLAPP laws, though whether this case would be covered under them would be better answered by a lawyer - like many things, it'd depend on the state statute and specifics not really mentioned here.
It might be part of the reason for dropping charging even a nominal fee for the font - becoming a non-profit activity might trigger more protection. It might even be deductible for even more tax savings than he was getting for selling it(deduct labor vs having to make a profit).
I'm not a lawyer or a tax accountant, of course. If you want to do something of this nature, talk with qualified professionals.
I don't read AC A human right
I notice that when I find myself having a difficult time reading, it's because I'm reading text written by some idiot who likes to use every uncommon word in his vocabulary as often as possible. I imagine that what is going on is that one part of my brain is just scanning my eyes across the text, snapping little photos under the high-res portion of my retina, then passing them along to the next stage in the pipeline. With common language, that next stage can largely guess what a lot of things are, and so it works with lower quality data which allows me to read faster. Then suddenly I start reading text from an author who likes to use uncommon words and that stage of the pipeline suddenly needs more data. Usually when you read, you don't look at the letters, you just recognize the whole words, sometimes even just the shapes of the words. ...but when you encounter new words you don't see often, those letters aren't in the cache, and you have to back up and examine the letters more closely. ...and if it's a word you've never seen before, you'll need to look even closer if you want to guess how to pronounce it, or you just do as I tend to do and commit the word shape to your memory and surprise yourself six months later when someone uses it in conversation and you find that the smudge of sounds you've been using for that word in your mind as you read aren't even remotely similar to the actual pronunciation.
So I wouldn't be so sure it's the font that is allowing you to read more easily. It might just be that he didn't include any text on the page written by some overeducated jackass.
The other guy sent him a D&C letter.
But I'm not sure what dilation and curettage have to do with free fonts.
#DeleteChrome
offtopic -
p.s. your site expired -
NOTICE: This domain name expired on 09/23/2012 and is pending renewal or deletion.
http://kaoticevil.net/
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Because of the control freakery that Amazon "needs" you can't actually read a book in it. I think Amazon and Google should get the support on this font super quick.
I am a big user of Amazon e-books and not having the ability to change the fonts kind of defeats a major selling point over old paper books. If Amazon started doing this I suspect they would be repaid several dozen times over with people who appreciate it.
I think users should be allowed to choose their own font. So what if it looks totally crap. Its personal preference and it doesn't affect anyone else. Let the "Marketing" droids go swivel.
BTW,I am a bit pissed because I never knew my reading was difficult until I used this font. It's kind of a realisation! And someone is trying to stop me being able to do things better.
I also understand that Amazon etc are working on licencing it, but if we could change our own font, we wouldn't have the issue.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
I typed newlines, but apparently Slashdot decided to eat them. I thought it was just a bug with the preview as I've seen it do that before, with the newlines showing up in the final post, but apparently I no longer have any choice but to use
tags if I want newlines.
Probably replying to a troll, but anyway:
As a teacher, I can tell you that dyslexia is definitely not "an excuse". A pupil with dyslexia has been a member of my tutor group for the last four years. He struggles with reading, although use of a reading ruler is of tremendous help. His handwriting is difficult to decipher, and contains many mirrored letters (e.g. b/d, p/q, backwards s). However that difficulty aside he is one of the most intelligent and articulate 16-year-old's I have had the pleasure of teaching.
First thing i thought of was that it looked like the Team fortress 2 fonts.
Accusing people of making excuses is just an excuse.
Who out there think that the whole dislexia thing is an excuse? Sort of like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
You forgot to sign your post:
Sincerely,
Mitt Romney
I often have the impression that people who don't spell well use dyslexia as an excuse. I am very much aware that dyslexia is a real thing and a big burden to many people, but I have seen too many university students who just are too lazy to check their spelling and then use the dyslexia excuse. So I think you have a point here, Anonymus Cow person. Having a hard time reading and spelling or being too lazy to invest time and effort into that does not make you dyslectic per se.
-- Cheers!
I've always wondered why people feel the need to post shit like this. It's as though suggesting you have anything to do with teaching forces a bunch of random pricks to analyze every character you write, desperately looking for any grammatical mistakes just so they can point out "herp derp hope you don't teach English!"
We're not in class, and your response is old and tired.
Who out there think that the whole dislexia thing is an excuse?
Well it's a bit obvious that you personally are just using it as an excuse.
But the fact that dumb people make dumb excuses for their dumb actions doesn't in any way mean the conditions dumb people claim to have do not actually exist.
I once met a person who claimed he could never add numbers, that 1+1 is in fact 3 and a bunch of other such statements. He blamed it on heart burn. Yes Heartburn!
Just because it is painfully obvious that heart burn was not in any way related to his (many) problems, does not mean heart burn does not exist.
You forgot to sign your post. "I. M. a stupid brainwashed liberal moron".
Go stand in the corner with The Earth is Flat society, and global warming deniers.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You forgot to sign your post, "I. M. a butthurt Romney supporter with no sense of humor. Boo Hoo! Pity me!"
...my favorite graffito
I am not an English teacher, although of course all teachers have a responsibility for incorporating literacy into their lessons. Strangely enough, I take far more care over my lessons than I do with Slashdot comments.
Just in case you ever do consider teaching as a career, can I recommend that you look to improve your method of giving feedback? A snarky comment is humorous, but does not maximise the potential for learning. It would be much better to write something along the lines of:
"That was a good post, and expressed your point clearly. However, you have missed a comma and used an apostrophe unnecessarily in your final sentence. Please re-write the sentence with the grammar corrected below."
This sort of formative assessment rewards the learner (with praise) for their achievement as well as providing guidance on how to improve in the future.
This font makes me wonder if some of the Sixties and Seventies poster designers were dyslexic.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Probably replying to a troll, but anyway:
As a teacher, I can tell you that dyslexia is definitely not "an excuse". A pupil with dyslexia has been a member of my tutor group for the last four years. He struggles with reading, although use of a reading ruler is of tremendous help. His handwriting is difficult to decipher, and contains many mirrored letters (e.g. b/d, p/q, backwards s). However that difficulty aside he is one of the most intelligent and articulate 16-year-old's I have had the pleasure of teaching.
I wonder if dyslexia is like ADHD -- *everyone* has a little bit of it, and officially "having it" merely means that one has it beyond a clinically significant level.
Kinda like being a few pounds heavier than one would wish but still within the "normal" range versus not, or a blood pressure a bit high versus one that they need to treat because it is "too" high. If true, something that helps dyslexia helps everyone to some extent.
As to the 16-year old and handwriting, there is no rule that he can't co-mingle capitol and lower-case letters, and hence the "obnoxious foursome" -- p,q, d, b -- can all be written as capitols (P, Q, D, B) where none of them look alike. Then when you add in "A" & "O" you have eliminated six letters that are damn near identical if you are dyslexic -- "p, q, d, b, a, o" -- and this font doesn't even make a "Palmer script" "a" -- which says something too.
Now it's clear to me why there's such a wide range of opinions regarding Comic Sans. I use it because I find it easier to read than most other fonts. Apparently, it has some characteristics in common with these dyslexic-friendly fonts. At least that's my new excuse for using it despite the mockery.
(I use a similar justification to call myself green, when in fact, I'm just cheap.)
> received a C&D letter
So what? C&D letters are pointless. You can print & send them for anything. I can send my girlfriend a C&D letter about her chewing too loudly. I can send one to the president about his cover-up of imported aliens from mars working as sex workers in the catholic church. I can send one to Casio because they stole my idea for using batteries to power watches, or to the electric company for beaming mind-control signals into my brain via the power lines in the neighboring states. They are totally pointless and carry almost no legal weight (the only thing that they do is prevent you from saying that you didn't know about the other person's grievance.]
The correct response to a C&D is to say that you've received it and will take it under advisement... and then do nothing about it unless it's pretty clear that you have done something wrong.
Later, Microsoft commissioned Verdana (Helvetica almost-clone) and Georgia (Times New Roman almost-clone) so they wouldn't have to get licenses for Windows' default fonts.
I thought Verdana was a "humanist" (that is, Frutiger-clone) font, not a "neogrotesque" (Helvetica-clone) font.
We're not in class, and your response is old and tired.
Class is never out. If I am a programmer and I am talking in a forum about code, I'd better be damn sure I'm writing compilable code.
Why is English treated as a special exception?
Compared to ( Mono || Gill ) Dyslexic it is appalling and doesn't even implement the asymmetry of letters that is key to parsing.
Because they weren't talking about teaching English, or even teaching in general. They just mentioned that they were a teacher.
We can like Yoda read better
I have had a good friend since high school who is painfully dyslexic. He can write, but only phonetically in his own modified alphabet. It works remarkably well once you get used to reading it. One day when he was young he got in trouble for flipping his own desk over and falling to the ground with it. That day they were taking a standardized test; the kind with rows upon rows of "bubbles" to be filled in with a #2 pencil. You see, he was frustrated by the bubbles floating off the page and tried to smash them back down onto the page with his hand. To his eye the bubbles had floated off his desk, so he unbalanced his desk with his swing and ended up on the floor.
I find the GillDyslexic font easier than the OpenDyslexic one due to the increased asymmetry.
Wouldn't... shouldn't a Dyslexic font be included as part of web fonts and free to use? Wouldn't it be nice to have the Gill font opened so we can use it by a Kickstarter campaign? I mean... £9.99 for a font, how the heck does that work? I can't see that working, can you?
A kickstarter campaign could include further research into the rewards to figure out what works best by methodical testing and it would raise cash a lot quicker than a $9.99 here and there.
Combine with a Yellow background.
Not just for Dyslexics, a good font might be better for all, but I don't think the Open one is that.
A blog I run for the wealth
> I wonder if dyslexia is like ADHD -- *everyone* has a little bit of it, and officially "having it" merely means that one has it beyond a clinically significant level.
That makes the huge and unproven assertion that everyone has some degree of ADHD. I reject that premise until it can be proven otherwise.
Would that font help Barry Soetero see that there is no e in corpsman?
Wow. I just came across this thread. All I have to say is that YOU are a loser.
You must be new here. Or maybe you are just stupid.
They're trying to trick dyslexics into paying $96!
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Well, it's a glaring error coming from someone who teaches kids, period. You're right, we're not in class, but perhaps said teacher is eager to learn about and correct this basic issue. In addition, naming himself "VVrath" can be seen as solicitation for pointing out improvement opportunities, and who are you to interfere with that?
I realize that many slashdotters don't give a flying rat's ass about grammar (mixing their with there, it's with its), so feel free to mod this to oblivion while modding up the equally uninteresting grammar denialist ("shit like this", "we're not in class", wow this IS novel and insightful). I like the fact that some people have the spine to express what is worth expressing despite the wrath of the plebs.
This kind of a reply would however have earned GP a snarky "You must be new here" comment in turn.
It's Slashdot. Polite feedback is generally expressed in a way that starts with "you're either an idiot or a shill, and ..." hereabouts. ~
Scroll down. Teacher is about to hand you your nuts on a plate, loser.
the font was
g to read,, a
niyonna elttil
Well, at least he's learning handwriting. I thought that was gone from the public school system.
But they all look alike too. You know, with all the domes and columns and stuff.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I wonder what the effect would be of a new writing script, different altogether from what we use, in which every letter reversed is identical to how it looks forward, as A, H, I, i, l, M, O, o, T, t, V, v, W, w, X, and x do. Would that help? Do dyslexics have less trouble with stories with pictures in them replacing words, I'm just curious?
Anyway, unless the new font is a direct copy of the old one, and it doesn't look that way to me, on behalf of the dyslexic community, I would like to say,
CKUF AEBLARDO NOGALEZZ!!!
We didn't start the flame war, peeps were hating on it 'fore I left my comment...
We didn't start the flame war, let the whole wide world know I'm a big old asshole...
~ College Humor.com (http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3980096/we-didnt-start-the-flame-war)
I read that in the sense that everybody can get distracted some times, but you only have ADHD when you get distracted so easily it affects your capacity do many things.
So the font itself is under Creative Commons Attribution. Not bad. But then:
The only way you'll make me unhappy is if you charge others for the font itself. That is all.
...in other words, it's simultaneously just an Attribution license, with a tacked-on Non-Commercial clause aside of the common CC licence.
It's not a standard licence, which adds another layer of complications. And because it has a commercial distribution prohibition, it's definitely not an "open source" project.
If you use Creative Commons licenses, go with the strictest license that describes your project to avoid unnecessary confusion. If you have a non-commercial clause, use the NC variants of licenses! Because nothing infuriates people more than seeing "it's under CC licence with no NC clause, cool" and then discovering that the actual license does prohibit commercial use to some extent.
Low-quality old books that were pressed in a printing-press had many defects that created irregularity. Strangely, This prompted easier-to-read-books which are regarded today as "beautiful" not despite, but because, of their poor quality.
What could be done instead of special purpose fonts, is to design\modify the font renderer. Maybe one of the open-source pdf viewers\libraries could have a "dyslexia" check-box. With it checked, the renderer will add a pass to go through the postscript file and add random defects. Simple pivoting and rotation will be easy enough but some spills could be thrown in as well. With a little physics I'm sure a liquid flow model or even some thermodynamics for hot stamping could be incorporated at a more advance stage with more control features...
Maybe even throw it in a tablet or a smart-phone for some cash flow ?
Any programmers in the house feeling up to it?
R.K.
Because they weren't talking about teaching English, or even teaching i/bolderal. They just mentioned that they were a teacher.
"They" are an individual, not a plural. But no educational specialty was specified, and I'm willing to cut a bit of slack for an individual who is involved with teaching "special cases." Unless, of course, the individual is an English teacher!
As to the 16-year old and handwriting, there is no rule that he can't co-mingle capitol and lower-case letters, [...]
Actually, there are rules that say you shouldn't intermix upper case (which is easier to spell than "capital") and lower case letters. Whether he should follow them or not is another issue.
Getting distracted from time to time is not ADHD. It's not even ADD.
Naturally, that's making the big presumption that either condition is even real.
It is now acceptable to use "they" as a singular pro-noun when being non-gender specific.
Living languages change.
You're even worse than the other guy. Wow, congrats!
I wonder if dyslexia is like ADHD -- *everyone* has a little bit of it, ...
If you read some of the testimonials from the font website, they read as "I never thought I had dyslexia, but reading this is so much easier". I have the opposite experience, the font is as annoying as reading in comic sans, being distracting and blocky, and reminds me of some really bad home-brewed free fonts. So if the font is viewed as a test for dyslexia, making things better for diagnosed dyslexics, I sure don't see any degree of benefit at all. There are clearly normal reading people and then those with dyslexia of varying degree.
...about the agnostic dyslexic insomniac?
He used to lay awake at night wondering if there was a dog.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're