Hey, I study special needs education for blind/visually impairment (and for hearing and deafblindness).
I was wondering if people with low vision experience differences between reading different printed alphabets (japanese/ arabic/ latin alphabet/ cyrillic etc) and if certain scripts are easier to read than others?
Does anyone know or know how to find those things out? I discussed it with my prof and he didn’t know either.
(If this post seems familiar it might be because I posted it (but worded differently) on reddit too)
I sustained damage to my macular last year and switched my kindle font to open dyslexic (as well as make the text larger and more spaced out) after reading became harder. That font helped to “anchor” the words down, particularly in the middle of my vision. Someone suggested a hyperlegible font which works almost as well but is better looking. From my very limited experience, I find the Cyrillic alphabet harder to read than the Roman alphabet - but that could just be my lack of familiarity with it. I learnt a little Ukrainian but only using duolingo.
I don’t know if this little nugget of info might help you, but years ago I was doing a PhD in psycholinguistics. I vaguely remember that different fonts can have an effect on comprehension and recall. I briefly considered an experiment to see if stuttering could be induced by different scripts. That was a long time ago though, I don’t know if that’s still the accepted case.
I’m a lifelong stutterer, I definitely noticed, especially in school when we had to read aloud, that I stuttered more when reading. I assumed it was more of a self fulfilling prophecy where I would get tense anticipating stuttering while reading so it happened, but would be interested in seeing if research around fonts ended up bearing any fruit.
I was able to show that people who stutter “stutter” when they read silently, as well as reading aloud! Although pressure/stress also makes stuttering worse, as you said.
That anticipation you mentioned - it’s called your phonological loop. It’s a cognitive process that happens subconsciously when we form words in our heads before speaking or as we’re reading. One school of thought about the cause of stuttering (and what my research supported) was that people who stutter are over vigilant in their phonological loop. Everyone analyses their speech before it’s articulated to a certain extent, but people who stutter seem to over analyse it like they’re almost expecting an error due to their stutter. That over analysis increases cognitive load and makes you even more likely to stutter; a self fulfilling prophecy, as you said.
I’ll take a look at my literature review later if I get a chance - I’ll let you know if I can find a paper about the effect of fonts.
Have you played with basic layout like line spacing, left justified vs full justification, increased spacing between paragraphs etc? There’s pretty good data that all of those increase readability and reading speed by giving you more features on the page to anchor on.
I’m not visually impaired (not more than the average for my age anyway) but I saw a significant reading speed and comfort increase when I implemented all of those recommendations alongside a comfortably readable font. I imagine they’d work well with Open Dyslexic or a hyperlegible font too.
Yep, increasing the text size helped a little, but adjusting the spacing, alignment and margins helped a lot. I keep the margins thin/small, the alignment left justified and the spacing moderate-wide. Those adjustments plus the more legible font has made reading almost as easy as before my eyesight was damaged. I do have to focus more though, or the words/letters in the centre of my vision go walkabout!