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Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

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31–37 of 37 posts

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#31
My overall expereience is that there's little, if maybe inverse relationship between programming skill and ability to spell.

But that much you've found out, I think discipline and good habits are what's most important.. Let's assume they won't become great at spelling, and not waste too much energy there, but instead focus on the mechanics around avoiding it becoming an issue.

The IDE will help with what's already in the language/codebase, and assuming those are spelled correctly, autocomplete makes it hard to mess up. The problem is new names, because they will proliferate throughout the codebase, while they may be easy to refactor internally, they will be challenging when they're exposed through some API.

My suggestion is that new names are verified by searching for them on a search engine and/or using a dictionary, not only to verify their spelling, but as importantly, to verify their meaning, (I've encountered correctly spelled words that just meant something completely different because spellcheck was used, but the word wasn't looked up in a search engine to find out if it actually meant what they thought).

Newly added names that has been added, can be kept in a list for quick copy-paste access to them while being used throughout the code-base, until autocomplete can reliably use them.

Another hint during "verification" is to avoid similar looking or sounding names if possible, but that's applicable to everyone, dyslexic or not.

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#32
Linters and types helped me a lot. When I started coding with Python and JS I introduced most Biggs due to typos or need to look up method names again and again and again ...

Now most of it is catched by tab completion, types and linting. That increased my joy of coding a lot.

Overall I like to code as you break down your intent into small statements. In high school I had to read and write long and convoluted texts and that was a pain. I made more then 25 mistakes on a single page during exames. Getting into software felt empowering as this did not matter anymore. There are still syntax errors in my code but I can fix them rather quickly without thinking to much about it.

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#33
post #27

There is a couple of fonts aimed to help dyslexics. [0] https://github.com/antijingoist/opendyslexic

OpenDyslexic is a TERRIBLE font for helping dyslexia, for how unconventional and distracting it is. I personally use Heinemann Special (but it’s not free), and sometimes Atkinson Hyperlegible.

> OpenDyslexic is a TERRIBLE font for helping dyslexia, for how unconventional and distracting it is.

It feels like it'd probably be nice to do more studies to explore which fonts are actually more or less helpful. I found this, but it only compares OpenDyslexic with some of the regular fonts: http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts...

For what it's worth, it seems like it's helping at least slightly.

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#34
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenDyslexic is a TERRIBLE font for helping dyslexia, for how unconventional and distracting it is. I personally use Heinemann Special (but it’s not free), and sometimes Atkinson Hyperlegible.

> OpenDyslexic is a TERRIBLE font for helping dyslexia, for how unconventional and distracting it is. It feels like it'd probably be nice to do more studies to explore which fonts are actually more or less helpful. I found this, but it only compares OpenDyslexic with some of the regular fonts: http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/sites/default/files/good_fonts... For what it's worth, it seems like it's helping at least slig…

The previous discussion of has a bit of both for and against:

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24036563

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#35

There is a couple of fonts aimed to help dyslexics. [0] https://github.com/antijingoist/opendyslexic

That is an incredibly hard to read font, see: https://opendyslexic.org/about I struggle far more parsing that than a typical monospaced font. In particular as that is 18pt, turn it down to a more normal 14pt and that's worse than most of Word's default fonts let alone coding specific ones.

I've found it works better on my ereader then my screen. More about consumption than writing. Monospaced serifed fonts with lots of colors are better for programming for me.

Re: Ask HN: Programming and dyslexia

#36
I'm a dyslexic programmer and what I find hardest about the job is keeping up when people list things in meetings. The number of times people suggest "Keep notes" as a solution for this is very repetitive. To keep notes you either have to be able to pre-empt something being worth taking a note of (it almost always only becomes aparrent after more context, by which time I've forgotten the name of the thing I should have taken note of and simple can remember the reference) or you have to be able to take note of everything. Recording and typing back isn't an option either as it simply takes too long.

The other thing I struggle with is being able to recall things in detail from what I have previously worked on. "What was x called that did Y you were working on last week?" I really struggle with that style of question.

For the spelling of variables names I use vim with spell check and mostly use ctrl+n to complete words so that they are spelt the same throughout. For the memory of function names being able to spin up a repl or run a subset of unit tests/ google/ autocomplete based on the estimated available properties of an object normally get the job done.

There are some really nice spell checks that integrate with vim that check the spelling of the words broken up by underscore so that each is checked individually. That helps a lot when writing a variable for the first time.

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