Notices by Daphne Preston-Kendal (dpk@chaos.social), page 2

@whitequark Okay, I boosted from 16px to 18px. It looks maybe a little too big to my eyes now (though probably I just got used to the old size and need to get used to the new one) – but I was pleasantly surprised that the line length didn’t seem too short when I opened it in the iOS Simulator, even without a media query. Thanks!

@whitequark @wingo Also, there is something to be said for programming against a single implementation whose behaviour is, in doubt, observable; especially on a platform like Windows which (historically at least) goes to great lengths to never break any observed behaviours; compared to POSIX which so often just shrugs and lets implementations do whatever …

(And I obviously say that as someone who works on a specification with many implementations which also just shrugs and underspecifies a lot)

@wingo Wait, couldn’t you compile LLVM itself to WASM, compile the WASM to C with Wastrel, then any compile time code execution in LLVM is inside the WASM sandbox too?

I realize that ‘get Wastrel to the point of being able to compile and run LLVM’ may itself be a tall order 😅

https://jyn.dev/i-m-just-having-fun/

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

There’s an alternate timeline where secure boot was invented by libertarian cypherpunks in the 1990s (‘the gubberment can’t access my data even if they mess with my boot partition or flash my BIOS to steal my passphrase!’), and in that timeline the exact same technologies the free software community believes are out to get us in this timeline are hailed as vitally important for users’ privacy and freedom

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

If you take security advice from a man who went around telling people not to set a password on their user accounts, you deserve everything you get

@zardoz03 Yeah, when they added a password feature to ITS he hated it and tried to get people in the AI lab not to set passwords. According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KR0rrXMJreM&t=818s he was also opposed to password-protected wi-fi networks as recently as 2012

Still a great idea to hold conferences in the US. Furthermore, nobody could have predicted this 12 or 18 months ago, so it’s entirely reasonable to continue with plans that were made in 2024

@whitequark Hmm, the calculated font size for me on mastodon.social is 15 px (actually smaller! although you can’t compare directly with point size between different fonts at this level of precision). I wonder if the problem is that I declare the font size only in px, while Mastodon seems to have a reset declaration first. (This may be mid-2000s CSS trauma speaking, though.)

@whitequark Bah, I thought 16px would be big enough (it’s been the default font size in browsers forever and is about the same size as UI text in most OSes); I was also trying to avoid adding a media query to have the font appear smaller with a narrower viewport for a reasonable line length on phones. I’ll try messing around with it later, thanks

ULT making the font bigger is more likely to be effective than changing to any particular font (same as for distance-based vision impairments, really)

So I’m boosting font size by about 1.5x in many slides

(Another advantage: encourages less text per slide!)

New blog post! I made the font size bigger on my slides to give a better presentation, and be more useful for dyslexic and vision impaired audience members https://crumbles.blog/posts/2025-12-11-presentation-fonts.html

On a more serious point about fonts on slides, having looked at the reasons people claim for using Comic Sans, I’m actually considering switching to some font that would be better for any dyslexic audience members. This turned into a bit of a rabbit hole.

(At the moment I just use Helvetica because 1. it’s the default in Keynote and 2. it’s a very good match in x-height and a near-enough match in cap height to Iosevka, so there’s an easy option for a matching monospaced font for code examples)

Spoiler alert: This is a thread about accessibility and it ends with me deciding not to do anything because of lack of evidence that doing anything would actually help more people than it hinders.

Mastodon, do not make me regret posting this thread, thank’s

So. The fonts people usually mention for this are OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie.

https://opendyslexic.org/

https://dyslexiefont.com/en/typeface/

The problems:

• There is no scientific evidence that these fonts help people with dyslexia read better
• The anecdata is split, with some dyslexic people saying they make it easier for them, but some saying they make it harder
• These fonts are *ugly* and do not feel appropriate on slides
• Because they’re ugly, they’re probably harder for non-dyslexic people to read

People – dyslexic or not – recognize words by their entire shape, not letter-by-letter. (This is why if you want a word to be recognized from far away – like on a road sign – you should put it in mixed/lower case, not upper case, even though upper case intuitively seems like it would be better because it’s ‘bigger’. People are more used to seeing words in mixed or lower case, so they will more quickly recognize them.)

If these fonts *do* work for people with dyslexia, it’s a reasonable guess that it might be because their severely distorted letterforms, compared to regular typefaces, disrupts normal word-level shape recognition and forces a similar engagement with letter-by-letter word recognition that seeing words in all caps does.

The problem is that if that hypothesis is correct, it also probably means that the dyslexia typefaces will get less effective for a dyslexic person the more they read with it.

(Again, there’s just no evidence here.)

So, seriously, what about Comic Sans? Well, apart from any other considerations, if I’m going to make a change to make it easier to read, I would prefer to choose a typeface that has been specifically designed and tested for purpose. If Comic Sans is better for people with dyslexia, it’s probably coincidence, and again – no evidence.