Dsxyliea

This reminds me of the meme that went around a few years ago (dear god, 2003!?), claiming that Cambridge researchers showed that you had no trouble reading scrambled word text: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm…

That's not what it's like for me. I simply can't tell the difference between symbols that have been rotated or reversed. So I made it through an engineering degree with "the alligator eats the bigger number" mnemonics for > and <. The first thing I do when I get a new dev machine is take a pen and write "\r\n" up above the delete key. I've never gotten the slashes in the right direction on that key sequence from memory…

This seems like an exaggeration of the descriptions I've heard about dyslexia, in that letters move way too far. Another huge problem is that the first and last letters don't change, and I'm betting that for dyslexics, those anchor letters don't exist. With the anchor letters, I find this trivial to read. It barely slows me down at all. Studies have shown that most people can read fairly easily when the first and last letters of a word are fixed…