So my friend’s kid has celiac and dyslexia and reading labels is difficult for them (also they’re like 7) so he’s teaching their pigeon, Grey Boy, to read the labels and identify ingredients with gluten. It’s going well, other than Nick thought it would be a good idea to make the behavior when the pigeon does find a bad ingredient to just fucking…wing slap the box. Just beat the shit out of it like, “no! BAD gluten! BAD!”
I see a lot of “they taught a pigeon to read?” comments and thought I’d explain a bit more.
So it’s not really like their friend’s pigeon now knows how to read. He’s not going to be terribly interested in a novel you hand him (unless he decides it looks like a good nest.) However pigeons are remarkably good at pattern recognition, especially visual patterns. They out-perform humans when it comes to things like identifying artwork/distinguishing between different artist’s works. So it is pretty easy for them to recognize a visual arrangement of ink, such as a printed word, and be taught to respond to that particular pattern. So when looking at an ingredient list the pigeon learns to pick out the specific pattern(s) he’s been taught to react to among the other patterns (words.)
So he sees “wheat” and doesn’t read it the way humans do (w-h-e-a-t spells wheat), but rather sees the arrangement of pigment that he has been trained to slap. So he slaps it.
He will have to be taught every single gluten containing ingredient for it to be super useful, but it is definitely possible, which is super cool! Plus it makes a little kid’s life easier, and enriches Gray Boy.
Skinner did experiments with pigeons that showed how a pigeon can learn to respond to a visual pattern cue, if your interested more in the science behind it.
i’ve stopped trash talking comic sans after learning the font is actually one of the only dyslexia-friendly fonts that come standard with most computers and i advocate for others doing the same
In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans, other dyslexia-friendly alternatives include Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Century Gothic and Trebuchet.
thank
Random fact: Verdana is one of the few fonts which was specifically designed to be as easy to read as possible, even at smaller type sizes. It was designed this way for use on screen, but the same principles apply in print too. This is part of why some Universities use Verdana as their default font for documents.
“In the event that you would like to continue hating Comic Sans” is one of the best things I’ve ever read on this website
Century Gothic and Trebuchet are both quite handsome typefaces.
I’m partial to Century Gothic as well. It’s serif, but not boring.
There’s also a dyslexic font designed especially for dyslexic people to read.
You can install on your tablets, laptops and browers etc, so not only can you change things like documents into it, you can change websites into that font as well!
I’m sure you’re bright enough to do a google search, but since I’m dumb enough to forget to post a link, here it is. Better late than never
I default to arial for this reason, but I will now be defaulting to verdana or dyslexie. nice.
I don’t think I have dyslexia but that dyslexie font was the easiest fucking thing to read ever. Books should be written in that shit.
ALSO!!!
For computer reading, when you mix up lines of text, there’s a web browser app called Beeline Reader. It looks like this
The colors are also customizable, to an extent and while I don’t have dyslexia, I have adhd which makes reading large amounts of text harder and this helps A LOT.
