Your keyboard switches languages in one tap. Dyslexia does not.
Three short trials. Each one puts you inside a moment that bilingual people with dyslexia hit every day, in Farsi, Mandarin and English. About two minutes.
trial 1 of 3, farsi
Read this sentence out loud.
Everyday written Farsi leaves out most vowel marks. Readers fill them in from memory. Here is what that feels like in English.
Ths s wht wrttn Frs fls lk. Th vwls r gn, nd y hv t gss thm.
This is what written Farsi feels like. The vowels are gone, and you have to guess them.
The real thing, first as people usually write it, then with vowel marks added:
سلام، حالت چطوره؟ فردا میبینمت.
سَلام، حالَت چِطورِه؟ فَردا میبینَمَت.
Meaning: “Hi, how are you? See you tomorrow.”
trial 2 of 3, mandarin
Pick the right character.
Typing Chinese on a phone means typing the sound in letters (pinyin), then choosing the character from a pop-up list. Every option below has the same sound.
You typed yǐ. You mean “already”. Which one is it?
One more. You typed wèi. You mean “not yet”.
The difference between 己 已 巳 is a single stroke length. Between 末 and 未, which of two lines is longer.
trial 3 of 3, the switch
Text a Farsi-speaking friend, in English letters.
Many people write Farsi this way. Type the message below one word at a time, pressing space after each word. Autocorrect is set to English. Watch what it does to the Farsi.
salam, khoobi? see you at 5, merci
Every Farsi word became a different English word. A dyslexic writer often cannot tell which word autocorrect replaced, because the replacement looks about as plausible as what they typed.
What this adds up to
- Dyslexia does not transfer between scripts. Accessibility settings should be per language, not per account.
- The switch moment is unowned. Keyboard, autocorrect and predictions need one shared active-language signal.
- Each script breaks at a different step: decoding, spelling, picking. One dyslexia mode cannot cover all three.
- No peer-reviewed study has asked bilingual adults with dyslexia about their phones. That is the study to run next.