Kevin Mar-Molinero talks about dyscalculia and copy/pasting

Kevin says: Give user choice: "Obviously what's good for me won't be good for someone else. We shouldn't be designing for a kind of homogeneous grade of people." Thanks to Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Transcript Nic I'm Nic Steenhout. And you're listening to the accessibility soundbites, a series of short podcasts where disabled people explain their impairments, and what barrier they encounter on the web. Of course, first, I need to thank Tenon for sponsoring the transcript for this episode. Tenon provide accessibility as a service, they offer testing, training and tooling to help fix accessibility fast. Today, I'm talking with Kevin Mar-Molinero. Hey, Kev, how are you? Kevin Very good. Thank you. Nic Thank you for joining me, I know this the end of the day for you, it's the start of the day for me. So we have a little bit of time split. Let me jump right into it and ask you, what's your disability or your impairment? Kevin So I have a couple actually. So I've only admitted to them I found out about them relatively recently. So I have dyscalculia, which is effectively the dyslexia of numbers. Numbers, frankly, to me make no sense. I find it very, very difficult to comprehend. When I see them, I see them as shapes. And I by and large survived kind of got through my life, my life through memory tricks and through kind of running my finger over a screen or just remembering what shapes looked like and what the shape expected shapes coming out of the bar. It's incredibly similar to dyslexia in that you can often place new numbers or completely arbitrarily miss numbers out of strings, so on and so forth. So it's kind of, I guess, it's a less a less well known cousin of dyslexia. But I am also dyslexic. So this is something which I've probably known all of my life, but I never went to get diagnosed. My sister is quite heavily dyslexic. My dad has dyslexia, my brother has dyslexia. I was of a generation where it wasn't something that was considered at school. So I was never diagnosed at school. And I went through my working career for years and years and years, right up to my late 30s, kind of avoiding the very obvious thing that I was dyslexic. And eventually, after a lot of nagging from my sister went to get it actually checked out and get it diagnosed. My dyslexia tend to be more, it's less around the kind of confusion of letters and within a sentence, I tend to manifest both in just completely arbitrarily missing words in a sentence, or, I guess from experience, I get the words, the wrong words in the wrong places. And I add things in. I do this quite regularly. It's understanding it has allowed me to kind of have coping mechanisms, I think it's been very interesting to kind of finally be honest about the fact that I have dyslexia and kind of realizing that sometimes my communication may be a bit more abrupt because I will think something in my head that won't appear out of my mouth. And certainly when I'm typing, it's, it's all over the place. Likewise, we chatted briefly before we came into the call. But I mentioned that today is the end of a long day of zooms. And I think for a lot of people, they see zoom and zoom fatigue has been a real problem. I'm the opposite. At the end of the day, I'd much rather do a zoom call, or do a telephone call, because I just reach the end of the day, and I don't want to read anything else that I want to type anything else, because I'm making so many mistakes. Nic It must be quite difficult to have dyslexia or any other condition and go through life and struggling with that. And then finally, when you're in your 30s, get that confirmed,. How much of a relief versus you know, I should have done this earlier versus do I have coping strategies that are established? And is that going to change with the diagnosis? How much of that happened? Kevin It was a bit of an embarrassment about not doing it earlier? Absolutely. I think, I g