[Balgair]

I'll hijack here a bit (sorry).

A good friend of mine in in a PhD program at UCLA. She's into solid-state physics and modeling. They use IgorPRO a lot in this field (oddly, also audiology). However, she can't use it a lick. She tries, she really does, but she just can't.

Why? Dyslexia. She has dyslexia. All the variables on the screen just look the same. i++ and i--, or +i and 'hi', or for() and if(). Just the same stuff to her. Its something not usually discussed, as I think most programmers don't have it so bad. 'Up to 17% of the population'[0] may have some form of dyslexia. It's something that really does impede many many people from just reading, let alone coding and programming. Does anyone know of a work-around for this at all? Thank you.

[0]http://dyslexiahelp.umich.edu/answers/faq

[dethstar]

This is perhaps more fitting in one of those QA sites or as an ask hn but i did some googling for you:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9657/programm...

[Balgair]

Thank you!

[nandemo]

The first google result suggests that IDEs and code-coloring might help:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/9657/programm...

Out of curiosity, does she not have a problem reading (or writing) physics papers?

[Balgair]

Yes, of course she does. But programming also takes it's own learning curve on top of it all.