Website for People With Reading Problems.

Off-topic
1

I am the author of www.geocities.com/carjug , a website that uses a vowel-sound color code to help people with decoding problems read faster. It is in it’s final development phase. I would love some feedback from anyone over the age of ten with a history of reading trouble that is not word-blind dyslexia. Fluent readers need not bother, it won’t appeal to them.
Here’s how it works: Go to the site, look over the vowel-color chart, then start reading the poems. Skip any that are not enjoyable, and give it 15-30 minutes.
Shoot me a note: carjug@yahoo.com . Good, bad, whatever. I want as much feedback as possible from adults before I pop this on kids! Have fun!
carjug
Chris Bogardus
(828) 406-9580

2

Contrast, my man. In your quest for readability you’re losing some, uh, readability because some of those colors don’t contrast well with the background. A couple of suggestions:

  • Try white. Notice most of the world’s top sites, including reading-intensive news sites, tend to have white backgrounds

  • With colors, go a little darker. The i’s and a’s seem to blend the most, and appear to “drop out” of the words they’re in.

  • Web-safe colors: Sticking to the 216 “web” colors is less and less of an issue that it once was. Especially in North America and other developed areas, pretty much all new computers support 24-bit color (16-million+ colors) so there isn’t a problem using any shades you want. Just be sure to test your finished product by lowering your display’s colors to see how they “degrade” to make sure you don’t end up with two colors the same.

Sorry I can’t comment on the reading part… Good luck with it!

3

We got lots of young’uns with reading problems here in our community.

The bigger problem seems to be their lack of motivation to read.

You can develop all the tools you like, make it as whiz-bang simple as possible to read, yet you won’t get more than 5 seconds of attention from these whipper snappers.

Break your site into bite-sized chunks (think, quicker to process than a TV commercial) and put some flashy movies or rock music or what-have-you inbetween the bites, and then you may have a better chance at snaring some of these ADHD-riddled youths.