Never during any session with the Psychologist that tested, diagnosed and supported me, any blurring effect was referred. I have never experienced it in the periods that I can’t read properly.

Dyslexia is how you brain interpret written information, not how your sight is doing. It is also something that changes, some days you can’t read long texts easily, in others the problem is much smaller. It helps to read and write daily as it trains the brain.

People with dyslexia have mainly visual thought (which is not just videos and images, but mainly abstract concepts and graphs). Visual thought is much faster than verbal thought and having insufficient time for translation is one of the key frustrations to all visual thinkers, dyslexic included.

Frustration, tiredness and stress reduce cognitive capability to all humans, in dyslexic, it worsens the verbal interpretation task

As for serif fonts, could not disagree more.
Actually, serif fonts and due to having serifs, makes it easier to read.
Serif fonts got bad reputation when screen resolution was too poor to make them usable on screens.
I see many non-sense articles offering totally crazy unreadable fonts and stating they’re better for dyslexics. They aren’t. Dyslexiefont, for example, is a pain for me.

Thank you for the change to participate in the debate.

I once had to deal with a password that was printed on a page where the instructions were all in a font with serifs, but the password itself was in a font with no serifs. It had a l, a I (note — those ARE NOT the same letter!), a O, and a 0. I could not compare the letters in the password with letters in the rest of the text to determine which characters I was looking at. I had to run through the various possibilities for each of those letters. Four such occurrences in a password yield 16 possible passwords.

The entire page had perhaps four hundred characters on it, but only the ten characters of that password were in the non-serif font.

Perhaps serifs should be reserved specifically for passwords!

I agree that italics are a problem. They look like shouting almost as much as ALL CAPS FOR A LONG TIME looks like shouting.

Personally, I’d like to see sites include a select text function or a “read to me” function for either selected text or the whole page. The ability to hear what is written makes the site barrier free to a person with dyslexia. Not all dyslexics read slowly, but to those who do, it’s good to be able to take some of the struggle out of it.

Made this hard to read, it is something to do with the spacing on line 3 at the beginning and then the “read. The letters” specifically the “d. T” has an unusual spacing (its almost like double spacing) and does something to my eyes which makes them jump up and right this is also similar to what you called the river effect, this can actually be triggered in 2 ways, on is that on while background all you see is the white pattern and you can no longer track the sentence or even see the words as easily as you should be able to, the second which was more accurate in this case is that the page fractured. It took me 2 goes to read and re focus on the lines because the text looked like this to me when I hit that point (ill see if I can format this).

Italics are sometimes used to highlight text. But you shouldn’t use italicized text because they make letters hard to read. The
you shouldn’t use italicized text because they
make letters hard to read. The letters have a jagged line compared to non-italic fonts. The letters also lean over making it hard for dyslexic users to make out the words [6].Italics are sometimes used to highlight text. But you shouldn’t use italicized text because they make letters hard to read. The letters have a jagged line compared to non-italic fonts. The letters also lean over making it hard for dyslexic users to make out the words [6].

If the formatting holds this should give you an idea of what it was like for me to read. Now the way I an most dyslexics will get around it will be to highlight the text as you can then read it separately from the rest of the text section by section. the rest of the article I had had no issues on, and I was actually reading it because for me, one thing you can test for dyslexia at any age is the river effect, and font / background colour. Every dyslexic I know (I was part of the SLD / SEST program in school and BDA out of school so I’ve talked to loads) suffers with the river effect in some way or other. My daughter is suffering with learning to read in a way I can empathise with (letters are handled as images not letters so, she doesn’t see the word yet, repetition isn’t helping as much as it should) so I am going to set up a page with 7 lines of text that she knows with a dyslexic unfriendly font and get her to read it on white and a coloured sheet. If I can see her doing what I do I will have to get my mum to do some testing with her a bit later on as she was a teacher and also taught classes at the BDA, hopefully I’m wrong but, well it looks too familiar to what I suffered through.

I can see parents comments above, if I can give you 3 tips to teaching and working with your dyslexic child and one insight that seems to help others:

1. Don’t be disappointed or frustrated with them, if they feel like its something that annoys you about them they wont want to do it, because the inference is that you are getting annoyed with them.
2. Find something they love and teach them using that subject or material, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t fit with school it doesn’t matter if its out of their normal age group utilise the interest and you will succeed better with this than anything else (in my case it was IT and its what gave me my skills to earn money).
3. Find a way to incorporate the learning into life, sitting down and studying more than your mates, well it sux and is like a punishment – which when added to 1 means its a punishment where your parents get angry with you, even when your trying your best!

Also when it comes to reading please realise that they may never enjoy reading. I read all the time but never for fun. The reason it turned out after much thought is that when I read the process takes slightly more concentration than it should and although I have a good imagination I cannot read and imagen at the same time, which according to my wife and others who have never had any issues is the fun they get out of it.