I love my open-dyslexic font on my Kobo. I read a lot, usually many hours while in bed late at night. I don’t think the font helps with my reading speed at all, but I just feel like I have less fatigue and I have to reread words and sentences less often (I often mistakenly assume a word or few words and then get confused why the sentence made no sense).

Anyway, I just saw a demo of bionic reading and it feels weird and fast. I instantly was gonna pay for a font, but according to my research it doesn’t really work on Kobo. The fonts just left-weight letters, but the actual bolding for eye-focus points has to modify epubs themselves. I guess on the xteink x4 (which I was thinking about buying) you can put custom firmware on that supports render-time bionic reading, but Kobo doesn’t allow anything like that.

So before I buy anything or waste any time converting epubs, I was wondering if anyone had any experience with both, and which they prefer? I think theoretically I could modify an epub with bionic reading and use my open-dyslexic font at the same time… I guess there isn’t much research suggesting either help readers, and bionic reading doesn’t seem to have been tested for dyslexics specifically at all.

I might give it a try tonight either way. I’ll report back if I do.

  • Dr. Bob@lemmy.caEnglish
    141·
    8 days ago

    This is supposed to work? I find it distracting and intrusive. I swear I could feel a headache coming on from just that snippet.

    • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world
      5·
      8 days ago

      Yeah if I try to read it word for word it’s headache inducing. Once I got the purpose of it, scanning the text instead of trying to read it normally worked surprisingly well

      • Dr. Bob@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        8 days ago

        But I don’t understand how skimming text at ultraspeed is supposed to increase comprehension and depth of understanding like the blurb says. It’s rather the opposite effect.

        • ComicalMayhem@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 days ago

          I don’t either. Maybe it helps some people. My best guess is that for some, they may not know what a sentence or word is supposed to mean until they have the whole context, but in this manner, they can quickly gather all the needed context clues and decipher what it means.