1259368 - Improve Reader Mode for dyslexics

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Sébastien Blin [:sblin] [:amarok]]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:44.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/44.0
Build ID: 20160211124446



Actual results:

Today, it's difficult to read a text or a book on the Web for a dyslexic and a lot of visually deficient people.
http://livrelecturebretagne.fr/ have a project to improve the possibility to read texts for dyslexics. And we figure out how some features can improve the reader mode on Firefox because the Web must be accessible.



Expected results:

So, this is the list of some features to begin:

+ More zoom capability? Why this feature is limited today? A lot of
visually deficient people use a zoom at x8 or x16 on a Video Magnifier.
+ More color mode, or add a custom color mode. It would be useful for a
colorblind.
+ Alternating colors for each syllable like
http://lirecouleur.arkaline.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/weblc.png. It could be useful to avoid to melt letters, but it can be difficult for some languages?
+ Alternating colors for each line.
+ To modify the spacing between lines and letters.

To improve the speech synthesis, a possibility is to color the text when the speech synthesis reads this text.

Comment 1

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

Thanks for filing this. The case for helping with dyslexia has come up in our discussions and is important.
I'm not sure how many options to ship built in and what belongs in an addon.

Note Zooming seems to work for me via short cut keys ([command] + [+], [command] + [-]).
Would highlighting and reading by word help as well?

Comment 2

[Sébastien Blin [:sblin] [:amarok]]

(In reply to David Bolter [:davidb] from comment #1)
> Thanks for filing this. The case for helping with dyslexia has come up in
> our discussions and is important.
> I'm not sure how many options to ship built in and what belongs in an addon.
> 
> Note Zooming seems to work for me via short cut keys ([command] + [+],
> [command] + [-]).
> Would highlighting and reading by word help as well?

Nice!

A group is currently testing the Reader Mode (and another app called Calibre). And they will create a list (during the next meeting I think).
I don't know how many options to ship built in too.

Yeap, zooming works, but I don't know if the max size is enough. (I already see some people who need a x24 zoom).

Comment 3

[Marco Zehe (:MarcoZ)]

(In reply to Sébastien Blin [:sblin] [:amarok] from comment #2)
> Yeap, zooming works, but I don't know if the max size is enough. (I already
> see some people who need a x24 zoom).
I am not sure this is actually our task. If somebody needs a zoom level this high, it is very likely they'll need it throughout the operating system as well, so they should probably use a dedicated magnifier such as ZoomText on Windows, and then zoom the reader view with that, too.

Comment 4

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Sébastien Blin [:sblin] [:amarok] from comment #0)
> So, this is the list of some features to begin:
> 
> + More zoom capability? Why this feature is limited today? A lot of
> visually deficient people use a zoom at x8 or x16 on a Video Magnifier.

I agree with Marco's assessment here. It's limited for both technical and UX reasons: it's bad UX for most people to give them very very large zoom factors, because the user gets confused about what's going on (if you want to see this, turn on a11y zoom on OS X on an unsuspecting user and zoom them all the way in on a bit of white/grey/black on their screen, and see how they cope). Technically, the zoom is a bit special - in many cases the viewport width doesn't immediately change, and so after a certain amount of zoom many webpages don't actually behave well - text wraps strangely and the page becomes hard to use. While we could work around this just for reader mode, when taking into account the points Marco made, I don't think it makes sense for us to invest specifically in this. Those users would benefit more from a general OS-level zoom tool. That or we should rearchitecture Firefox's zoom functionality completely, but that's out of scope for this bug.

> + More color mode, or add a custom color mode. It would be useful for a
> colorblind.
> + Alternating colors for each syllable like
> http://lirecouleur.arkaline.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/weblc.png. It
> could be useful to avoid to melt letters, but it can be difficult for some
> languages?
> + Alternating colors for each line.
> + To modify the spacing between lines and letters.

On Firefox 49 (developer edition and nightly, release in a few months) you can change the line-spacing. You can't change letter-spacing at the moment.


> To improve the speech synthesis, a possibility is to color the text when the
> speech synthesis reads this text.

Current versions of Nightly have speech synthesis in reader mode and do this.

I'd also add that perhaps alternative fonts might be useful. I'm sure we've all seen e.g. https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/dyslexia-font/ . I'm not intimately familiar with the research, so I don't necessarily mean we should be using that particular one, it's just another aspect that we might be able to offer options in.


I would potentially take patches for this type of functionality if they don't radically alter the rest of reader view (not everyone will appreciate alternating colors, of course!), but unfortunately I don't think the frontend team currently has bandwidth to implement this type of colorization/support, so I'm down-prioritizing this to reflect that.

Comment 5

[Josh Beauregard]

I just want to bump this. It is very important to some one like me to have.

I simply need the ability to choose a font that works with my brain in reader mode.

Also I wanted to share a few examples of why this is important for the neuro divergent community to have access to: bellow are two examples of what its like to try and process text on a screen or a book.

• https://www.dyslexia.com/question/what-dyslexics-see/
• https://geon.github.io/programming/2016/03/03/dsxyliea

One of the challenges of dyslexia is that we have a hard time staying on the line we are reading, as lines can seem like they are curving or moving.

A common mistake of mine is that critical but short and similar not and now are confusing and visually interchangeable to my weird brain.

Once can very quickly realize

What makes a font like https://www.dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/ or open dyslexic work is that the heavier bottom helps keep my brain on the right line.

I know they are visually un appealing and no marketer would ever want use them but I need them. Right now I enter reader mode select all (which works most times. and then paste into a word pad that lets me choose the font.