Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Dyslexia Font for Firestorm users


I know a lot of people out there have Dyslexia.

WikiPedia's article on Dyslexia says the following:
Dyslexia, also known as reading disorder, is characterized by trouble with reading despite normal intelligence. Different people are affected to varying degrees. Problems may include difficulties in spelling words, reading quickly, writing words, "sounding out" words in the head, pronouncing words when reading aloud and understanding what one reads.
WikiPedia's article suggests a potential remedy for some forms of Dyslexia:
There is some evidence that the use of specially-tailored fonts may help with dyslexia. These fonts, which include Dyslexie, OpenDyslexic, and Lexia Readable, were created based on the idea that many of the letters of the Latin alphabet are visually similar and may, therefore, confuse people with dyslexia. Dyslexie and OpenDyslexic both put emphasis on making each letter more distinctive in order to be more easily identified. The benefits, however, might simply be due to the added spacing between words.
Firestorm viewer has a built-in font for this. You can either read their excellent documentation or follow these steps:



  1. Navigate to your Preferences menu (Control-P or Avatar - Preferences).
  2. Click the User Interface tab.
  3. Click the Font sub-tab.
  4. Select Dyslexia from the Font Scheme drop down menu.
  5. Click the OK button.
  6. Restart Firestorm.

You may need to increase the size of your fonts to get the full benefits. That you can do with the Font Size option, for which Firestorm also has excellent documentation.

(I added font size controls to my Quick Preferences menu, which I demonstrated a while back on the blog.)

And if you'd like to use the free Dyslexie font for all of Windows:

  1. Go to the Dyslexie Font home page
  2. Click Order.
  3. Click Home.
  4. Select your country and select the Home 1-user options.
  5. Click Next Step.
  6. Enter the requested information to create an account. (I hate it when forms make you say that you're not a robot. Very discriminatory against robots.)
  7. Click Checkout.
  8. Check your email, click the Go To link.
  9. Enter your email and password.
  10. Under Download Dyslexie font, click Download.
  11. Click Download Dyslexie Font (Regular).
  12. Go to your Downloads folder in Windows.
  13. Right click the font and select Install.
That should install the font to Windows, and you can hit F1 and search for the appropriate menus in which you can change display fonts. Or, you can ask Cortana, and she'll prove how much more useless than the already-useless Siri is at actually doing useful and helpful things.

What other helpful tools and tips and workarounds do y'all out there use?