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Dyslexic Myths Presented as Truths

Gareth Ford Williams writes about the Smashing Magazine article Adding A Dyslexia-Friendly Mode To A Website, which I covered in dai11y 13/12/2021. He is highly critical of it, both here and as a comment on the article itself, for the following reasons.

Firstly, the entire concept of a ‘dyslexia mode’ is “appalling”; Gareth touches on the ethics and possible GDPR breaches by building such a mode, especially if it allows us to ‘diagnose’ users and store this medical information in a cookie or in a profile.

A lot of the advice in the article, Gareth claims, is aimed at accommodating users who have Irlen Syndrome, not dyslexia. The former is a problem with the brain’s ability to process visual information, whereas the latter is an audio condition. Gareth also says some of the advice, such as “fewer distractions”, are for other cognitive groups such as ADD, ADHD or ASD.

The research quoted in the article has “only 27 subjects, all the same age, in the same class”, so not a reliable sample size. Gareth also argues a lot of the points around font choices, use of Comic Sans etc is presented without evidence.

Thanks to James Buller for notifying me of Gareth’s response to the article. I’ve now added a disclaimer to my previous dai11y article, pointing to this one.

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