Stevie Bonifield / The Verge:
Google expands Google Translate's live speech translation from Pixel Buds to any headphones, supporting 70+ languages, in beta on compatible Android phones  —  Live speech translations were once only on the Pixel Buds. … Google Translate's latest update brings live speech translations …

Hollywood director Carl Erik Rinsch was convicted of scamming $11 million from Netflix to spend on luxury items, including five Rolls-Royces and a Ferrari, as reported earlier by Deadline. A New York jury found Rinsch guilty of several charges on Thursday, including fraud and money laundering. Rinsch, who's known for directing 47 Ronin, was charged […]

What do you get the man who says he has everything? It's a tough question - and one you have a limited amount of time to answer, given the holidays are nearly upon us. You could try dropping subtle hints or asking friends and family for suggestions, but they might save their best ideas for […]

Youki Terada, writing for Edutopia in 2022 (via Jens Kutílek):

Under close scrutiny, the evidence for dyslexia-friendly fonts falls apart. In a 2017 study, for example, researchers tested whether OpenDyslexic, a popular font with thicker lines near the bottom of the letters, could improve the reading rate and accuracy for young children with dyslexia. According to the developers of the font, which is open-source and free of charge, the “heaviness” of the letters prevented them from turning upside down for readers with dyslexia, which they claimed would improve reading accuracy and speed.

Researchers put the font to the test, comparing it with two other popular fonts designed for legibility — Arial and Times New Roman — and discovered that the purportedly dyslexia-friendly font actually reduced reading speed and accuracy. In addition, none of the students preferred to read material in OpenDyslexic, a surprising rebuke for a font specifically designed for the task.

In a separate 2018 study, researchers compared another popular dyslexia font — Dyslexie, which charges a fee for usage — with Arial and Times New Roman and found no benefit to reading accuracy and speed. As with the previous dyslexia font, children expressed a preference for the mainstream fonts. “All in all, the font Dyslexie, developed to facilitate the reading of dyslexic people, does not have the desired effect,” the researchers concluded. “Children with dyslexia do not read better when text is printed in the font Dyslexie than when text is printed in Arial or Times New Roman.”

Quoting from the abstract of the first study cited above:

Results from this alternating treatment experiment show no improvement in reading rate or accuracy for individual students with dyslexia, as well as the group as a whole. While some students commented that [OpenDyslexic] was “new” or “different”, none of the participants reported preferring to read material presented in that font. These results indicate there may be no benefit for translating print materials to this font.

The problem isn’t dyslexia if you don’t notice that OpenDyslexic is “different”.

Quoting from the second cited study:

Words written in Dyslexie font were not read faster or more accurately. Moreover, participants showed a preference for the fonts Arial and Times New Roman rather than Dyslexie, and again, preference was not related to reading performance. These experiments clearly justify the conclusion that the Dyslexie font neither benefits nor impedes the reading process of children with and without dyslexia.

OpenDyslexic’s website has a “related research” page but of the four articles they link to, three are 404s, and the other one only studied “extra-large letter spacing”. I chased down the correct link to one of the other articles they cite, and the only fonts it studied were Verdana, Arial, Georgia, and Times.

Some people claim to prefer reading text set with OpenDyslexic. Some people like Comic Sans, too. But I was unaware that these typefaces that purport to be designed specifically to benefit people with dyslexia are based on misguided beliefs that dyslexia is a visual problem, and that actual research shows they do not provide the benefits they claim to. They’re just ugly fonts.

WASHINGTON—Searching in vain for a meaningful way to retaliate after Indiana lawmakers rejected his Republican gerrymandering push, a visibly frustrated President Donald Trump was reportedly struggling Friday to find any infrastructure left in the state that could still be destroyed. “I’m looking all over, and there’s just no way we can make this any worse,” Trump said […]

The post Frustrated Trump Struggling To Find Any Infrastructure Left In Indiana To Destroy appeared first on The Onion.