One message, from first tap to send. Every place it breaks.
A bilingual person with dyslexia replies to a friend. The reply mixes Farsi, English and a Chinese word. Open each stop to see what happens, who it hits, and what the research says.
highlight the stops that hit one persona
works for most people
فردا ساعت ۵ meeting داریم؟
“Do we have the meeting tomorrow at 5?” Mixed-script text is normal in bilingual chats. Nothing breaks yet.
friction that dyslexia makes worse
- What happens
- Everyday Farsi omits short vowels. The reader reconstructs each word from consonants and context.
- Why it is worse
- That reconstruction is letter-by-letter decoding, the process dyslexia disrupts most.
- Evidence
- sourced: Vowel-free Persian behaves as an opaque script; readers rely on sub-lexical decoding. Pouretemad et al., 2011.
- Fix to test
- Optional vowel-mark display in reading mode.
friction for bilingual users
- What happens
- The user must decide the language before the first letter. Forget, and the word comes out in the wrong script and has to be deleted.
- Evidence
- hypothesis: Widely reported by bilingual users; no peer-reviewed study measures it, and none for dyslexic users.
- Fix to test
- Detect the language from the first two words and switch silently.
friction that dyslexia makes worse
salam → salad · khoobi → hobby · merci → mercy
- What happens
- Many people write Farsi in Latin letters. English autocorrect treats every one as a typo.
- Why it is worse
- A dyslexic writer already doubts their spelling. The replacement looks about as plausible as what they typed, so it slips through.
- Evidence
- sourced: Adults with dyslexia make more spelling errors in a second language and type less accurately with more visual checking. Annals of Dyslexia, 2025; Reading and Writing, 2025.
- Fix to test
- Autocorrect that follows the active-language signal and never replaces a word it has never seen.
friction for bilingual users
- What happens
- Predictions come from all languages at once, or from the wrong one. The user reads three suggestions to find none that fit.
- Evidence
- hypothesis: Reported by multilingual users; not studied.
- Evidence
- sourced: Dyslexic error patterns differ by language, so a single mixed model would need per-language error data. Language Resources and Evaluation, 2022.
- Fix to test
- One shared active-language signal for keyboard, autocorrect and predictions.
friction for bilingual users
see you فردا at 5
- What happens
- Farsi runs right-to-left inside a left-to-right sentence. Deleting or inserting near the boundary moves the cursor somewhere unexpected.
- Evidence
- hypothesis: Known bidirectional-text behaviour; its cost for dyslexic users is unmeasured.
- Fix to test
- A visible direction boundary, and a cursor that stays where the finger is.
friction that dyslexia makes worse
yǐ → 己 · 已 · 巳
- What happens
- Typing the sound is easy. Choosing the character from a row of same-sound options is a visual task.
- Why it is worse
- Chinese dyslexia involves visual processing of character shape. The picker shows shape only.
- Evidence
- sourced: Siok, Perfetti, Jin & Tan, Nature, 2004; PNAS pinyin study; Frontiers in Psychology, 2017.
- Fix to test
- Meaning hints or a short context preview next to each character.
friction that dyslexia makes worse
- What happens
- The user proofreads Farsi without vowels, English that autocorrect touched, and a Chinese character chosen by shape. Each needs a different check.
- Why it is worse
- Adults with dyslexia rely more on visual monitoring while writing. Here it has to run three ways at once.
- Evidence
- sourced: Reading and Writing, 2025.
- Evidence
- sourced: Early bilingual reading changes how dyslexia shows in adults. Scientific Studies of Reading, 2018.
- Fix to test
- Accessibility settings per language, so each script gets its own support.
works for most people
- What happens
- The message goes. Or, after enough friction, the user switches to voice. That workaround is a hypothesis worth testing first.
- Evidence
- hypothesis: No study has asked bilingual adults with dyslexia what they do on their phones.
Where the friction sits
Nine stops. Two are fine. Three trip up any bilingual user. Four are made worse by dyslexia, and each of those four is a different script breaking in a different way.
Sourced claims are tagged S; hypotheses to test in interviews are tagged H.