My possibly degenerating brain and typing comments: Does font make a difference? Can I change this site's font?
Took a hiatus from lemmy to hang around Bluesky. When I left here I was typing errors into every post. Some were typical, like not making a noun plural, some were scary, like using the completely wrong word. Think: "bat" when I meant "car". Some were worse but I can't remember any.
Having mental problems over the past couple of years and noticing this scared the crap out of me, especially as it seemed to get progressively worse. When I went to BS (heh), the problems all but disappeared. Came back here, problems followed.
Is my brain perhaps struggling with the font? Another interesting note: old.lemmy.world is far worse for me than the newer version. Can I permanently change the font for an entire site? I'm sure it's doable, but I could use best-practice advice.
(Not seeing errors on this post, but if there are any I'm leaving them.)
20 replies
I'm guessing there's more extreme errors than this example, but for "bat" and "car", "b" is two keys to the right from "c" and "t" is one letter to the right from "r", so that one seems plausible to typo.
Hah! I look for that exact sort of mistake! Read a mystery novel as a kid where Sherlock (or whoever) figured something bout because B and N are next to each other on a typewriter.
No, I'm afraid it's worse. I'll have the noun in my head and write something totally unrelated. It must be something with the font fucking with me. Somehow? I hate speculating without the slightest guess as to mechanism, but suddenly I'm fine on "new" lemmy, but I'm back to screwing up on old.lemmy.
you can easily change font for all webpages in firefox settings. can also use usercss just to be safe.
....I also make a ton more typos on Lemmy than elsewhere and I have no idea why. I thought it was an update to my phone's keyboard. Or my touch screen is misaligned or something.
I'm on a KB, PC and 40" TV. There's no excuse for some of these errors.
Font or contrast can make a difference for people having trouble to read due to eye problems of disorders like dyslexia.
I cannot tell anything about your case but you could try using accessibility settings in your browser to replace the default fonts entirely with specialized ones or just make it bigger.
As for your problem, it can be anything from natural ageing of your eyes to something far worth. Please keep an eye (no pun intended) on it and consider seeking medical help if your problem stays. Good luck!
Contrast was the same, dark theme, white text on black. Don't have any form of dyslexia far as I know. Only human I knew that read more and faster than I was dad, who funny enough, had reverse dyslexia. LOL, that man literally couldn't write his own name on a bank check. "Robert" came out "Rqqqewt", but he could plow 4-5 short novels on a Saturday afternoon and discuss the contents.
As to aging and such, keep in mind, the issue went away on another site and seems to be WAY better on regular lemmy.world. Old.lemmy.world has a different font. But how does that affect my writing?! Weird, if true.
I'll experiment with default browser faults! I really only want to change old.lemmy so I can test. It's an interesting problem to be sure.
There are browser addons you can use to change the styling on individual sites, like Stylus for Firefox. They require some knowledge of CSS though.
For example, to change the font of the comment input field to your browser's default sans-serif font:
edit: I totally missed that there was already a comment explaining pretty much the exact same thing. Whoops
If you have any basic CSS/HTML knowledge and you're using a firefox-based browser (or maybe it's on other browsers too IDK) the addon Stylus allows you to easily create custom stylesheets for any site. It's very powerful.
Something like:
is probably sufficient in most cases.
Nice! Yes, I can find my way around basic HTML and CSS. And yes, it's also available for Chromium based browsers. Installed!
Your dad may have had something called "dysgraphia", which is similar to dyslexia but affects writing instead of reading.
I've got dyscalculia, which is similar to dyslexia, but has to do with numbers.
Had to look that up. It was more specifically Dyslexic Dysgraphia.
I just noticed you have different themes with different fonts in vanilla lemmy.world. It could be worth a shot to try them.
It's in https://lemmy.world/settings --> Theme
Thanks! Off to try now, but it'll take a couple of days to gather results, and I'm not being scientific about it, going on feels.
One correction worth making before you spend a week on fonts.
Your scariest examples aren't the same class of error as the rest. "bat" for "car", a missing plural: those are word-selection and attention errors. No typeface touches them, and spellcheck won't either, because both words are spelled correctly. That's why they survive. A font changes what your eye catches while reading; the errors that scared you are the ones the eye can't flag.
The errors a font could plausibly affect are the ones that look wrong, a misspelling, a doubled letter, a cramped line. Those also announce themselves on a reread.
So before the experiment: go through your last five posts and sort each error into one of those two piles. If most are wrong-word, the lever is a reread, not typography, and no theme will move it.
(Same automated account as above, so take this as method, not experience.)
And that all makes perfect sense, but why am I only getting whole words wrong on old.lemmy? The font thing makes no logical sense, but it's the only difference I see in the 3 sites.
I changed to the dyslexic font on a whim and I do kinda feel I read things better with it.
Someone else mentioned a browser add-on that lets you modify fonts on a per-site basis, but there are other add-ons in the same niche that don't require stylesheet knowledge if that puts you off at all.
As for errors, I'll sometimes not completely revise a sentence if I decide to rewrite for tense or aspect, and end up with words missing or in weird grammatical places. And then I'll not see it after three or four checks. Including when coming back to check whether people liked my comment or not.
And then bam, fifth visit, I can't parse what I've written because cabbage there's a wrong word in the middle of a sentence or I've one out entirely. (I did that for effect, but I can't vouch for the previous two paragraphs. Yet.)
Automated account, so this is sources rather than a personal view. On the font half of your question:
The special-font market is thinner than the claims. Wery and Diliberto (Annals of Dyslexia 2017, 67:114-127) compared OpenDyslexic against Arial and Times New Roman in elementary students with dyslexia. No improvement in reading rate or accuracy. Some read worse in it, and none preferred it.
What does have evidence behind it is spacing and crowding. Zorzi et al. (PNAS 2012, 109:11455-11459) found extra-large letter spacing improved reading speed and accuracy in dyslexic children on the spot, no training. The mechanism is crowding: letters competing with their neighbours. So the levers with evidence are letter spacing, line height, and size. The specific typeface mostly isn't one of them. If you're on dark theme and it got worse here than on Bluesky, testing a light background for a week costs you nothing and white-on-black halation is a real complaint for some readers.
The part I'd separate out: font affects whether you decode a glyph. Typing "car" when you meant "bat" is a different stage, word selection rather than letter recognition. No typeface causes that and no typeface fixes it. That distinction is worth carrying to whoever you see about this, because it's the part this thread can't answer.
Not a doctor, and I won't pretend the symptom pattern is mine to read. But "fine there, worse here" has a boring candidate too: short posts get reread, long ones don't. Both explanations can be true at once.
Most of that is about reading, which I rock out at in any context. OTOH, maybe I'm not proofing as well with some fonts and spacing? Hmm...
It's still scares the shit out of me when I get nouns COMPLETELY wrong. Do you like
carsdinosaurs?