John Tubbs talks about dyslexia and user choice

John says, among other things: "Let the user choose. Don't ever dictate to someone's assistive technology". Thanks to Fable for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic Hi, I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility rules soundbite, a series of short podcasts, where disabled people explain their impairment and what barriers they encounter on the web. Just a quick reminder that transcripts are available for all episodes at a time of publication from the website at https://a11yrules.com. Thanks to Fable for sponsoring this episode. Fable is a leading accessibility platform powered by disabled people. Fable moves organizations from worrying about compliance to building incredible and accessible user experiences through product testing, and custom courses. Learn more about how fable can work for your team at makeitfable.com/nic Nic Today I am talking with John Tubbs. Hey, John, how are ya? John Good to be here. Nic. Thank you. Nic Well, thanks for joining me. Let's talk a little bit first about what's your disability or your impairment? John It's an interesting question. I've never had a formal diagnosis. But working with the whole area of accessibility, universal design such in my work at the University, I've been able to kind of self diagnose and looking back at my history academically, educationally, developmentally, I could see where there were certainly some things that I did not address or were not addressed with me by people in my past institutions, in my past that they probably should have! Really what I can trace it down to is I have a language processing, a Semantic Processing problem that really jumbles words, re... puts words back together in odd situations, or relationships. The best way to describe it, and for folks that are from America, and of my age, which is late 50s. You probably remember the electric company is a children's show on public television. And they had a learning skit that they always did, and they took an opening consonant sound, and a closing vowel consonant sound, and then assemble them pa at Pat, cup at cat. So what my processing does is it will look across a sentence of words on a page, and it will start reassembling the words on me. So I will see Pat instead of cat or bat instead of cat, as I'm reading through, and the biggest place where I see it happen often is between lines of text. So as I'm reading through, I will be reassembling words based on letters in combination and see in other lines while I'm reading. So it's it's pretty difficult for me to consistently read through long form, especially if it's tightly compressed words on a page or on the screen. The other interesting thing about this though, it's not just in my own reading practice, it comes to me just... It rolls in my head as noise. So the best option I can ever description I can give of this is growing up I played hockey. And I would remember being on the ice, like lining up for a face off. And I would hear these, the electric company playing in my head. It was something I would see something in the stairs on the scoreboard on the stands, a sign a fan might be who knows, a word would hit me and I would start spinning of all what consonant combination in my head as I'm playing hockey, so it's something that once my head starts spinning, it's it's like the roulette wheel with the ball going around in one direction and balls go in the other direction. And it just becomes this cognitive noise. That is just nerve racking. Yeah, and I've never outgrown that, surprisingly. Nic So, if we were to put a label on, at least the first part of what you describe, I would associate that strongly with dyslexia. John Yeah, that's been that's been my take on it. My wife who also studies disability and has a lot of experience with her own students, as a professor would go to the same way, come to the same conclusion. I would also have to add, you know, I do have some of the