Tuesday, April 13, 2010

CHI2010 and dyslexia

There was a great Alt.chi paper given as a comic ( I loved it ).

I'd love to do  an Alt.chi paper as a comic. I began to wonder what to do and wondered about doing one for dyslexia. I've been doing a quick look but I didn't much about designing stuff for dyslexics but did get a few papers. What I notice is that they talk about overcoming limitations of dyslexia rather than trying to support what dyslexics are good at.

Perhaps there is a simpler paper about creating user guides for dyslexics using comics ( comic/text ) comparison?
'Dyslexia affects at least 1 out of every 5 children in the United States'


functionally illiterate person can read and possibly write simple sentences with a limited vocabulary, but cannot read or write well enough to deal with the everyday requirements of life in their own society
85% of US juvenile inmates are functionally illiterate.
All over the U.S.A. 30 million (14% of adults) are unable to perform simple and everyday literacy activities.[3]


What about a program that generates comics automatically.

Gregor, P., Dickinson, A., Macaffer, A and Andreasen, P. (2003) See-Word - a personal
word processing environment for dyslexic computer users, British Journal of Educational
Technology, 34(3) pp. 341-355
8. McKeown, Sally (2000). Dyslexia and ICT: Building on Success. British Educational and
Communications Technology Agency

User sensitive inclusive design”— in search of a new paradigm ACM Conference on Universal Usability 2000 

Dyslexia and learning computer programming - Proceedings of the 9th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education


( this looks good ) 







Perhaps we could take the approach of dyslexia being a both a negative and positive thing requiring new approaches to software design.


This is also a good link talking about the positives of dyslexia.  



"The gift of dyslexia is being able to see the whole picture at once.
It's being able to make huge intuitive and creative leaps in thinking that lead a person to the problem's answer without having to take all the usual steps to get there. It's having the unique perspective to see all possibilities from all angles. It's being completely confounded by the small, mundane, rote, basic forms of learning, yet able to master the advanced, abstract concepts meant for older, more experienced students without even trying." 


The most common difficulty that comes with dyslexia is the inability to, or difficulty with, a concept called sequencing, the step-by-step way in which most people solve problems and organize their lives


How do we create software to both support the negatives (the disabilities) and more importantly the positives ( the abilities ). OK supporting the negatives supports low 



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