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."
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.
Fonts are a lot more complicated than you think. You're not going to easily be able to convert a given imagefile into a font.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Actually, it seems to be a little harder to read than normal for me. I've never thought I had dyslexia, though.
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.
What a shame the guy never thought to test it on any dyslexics, instead of making up a load of random shit about how he thought his font would work. I mean, that must be what happened, since you're dyslexic and you've declared that it doesn't work. And all dyslexics must all be the same, since you didn't just say "it doesn't work for me."
He more or less did say "it didn't work for me", so I fail to see why you'd treat him with sarcasm.
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.
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.