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Ask HN: Good Browser Plugins for Dyslexics

4 points by sdmike1 ↗ HN
I'm dyslexic and reading documentation can be a real pain if the lines are long (I'll get lost in the middle of a sentence and loose what line I'm on, in particular the transition between lines is really rough). In the past, I've been saved by the ability to resize my browser window or the fact that man pages are 80 chars wide. Unfortunately the docs I've been dealing with at work lately don't re-flow when you change the size of the viewport, they just gain a horizontal scrollbar, which is less than helpful.

Does anyone have any good browser extensions for dyslexics? Specifically any that help with following a line to the next one down.

I recall seeing an extension in a thread on here about Dyslexia in the past few months that really helped. It would highlight the last word or two of a line and put a matching highlight on the first one or two words of the next lines.

6 comments

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rudolph9
I use the [OpenDyslexia font][1] which is somewhat helpful but the more I got used to it the less helpful it has become.

The plugin you’re describing sounds pretty helpful! I wonder if it could be built just using CSS rules?

[1]: https://www.opendyslexic.org/

sdmike1
I've never found the OpenDyslexia font to be particularly helpful, but I'll give it another go!

Right though! I'm super frustrated that I didn't bookmark it! As for building it with just CSS rules, does CSS have a way to detect if something is the last word on a line before a break? or the last n chars on a line before a break? If so it shouldn't be too bad... Add some JS to rotate through some highlight colors per-line and it should work no?

rudolph9
It’s unfortunate that often special formatting is done to documentation. I understand for marketing websites and landing pages why orgs want it but docs need to be consumable by many different parties. I find it very frustrating when orgs add js and css that break accessibility of documentation!
helph67
The extension may be Scroll Reading which highlights a sentence from one line to the next... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrollreading...
sdmike1
This looks helpful! I'll try it today! Its not exactly the plugin I recall, that one did all of the lines right away and used different colors per-line.

Thank you none the less for taking your time to find this! :D