Dyslexia and Coding

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Hello,

I am dyslexic! :-)

Dyslexia is a polymorphic condition that affects more than just reading and writing. It is thought to be caused by poor short term memory, where short term memory is about equal to the length of time it takes to turn a key in a lock. A common analogy is that the CPU is good but the buffering on I/O is not good enough to keep up with the CPU. For example, it would be like having a keyboard or scanner with a buffering system that mixed up input or output and sometimes lost characters. This would also make it difficult to rapidly change from reading to writing and explains why doing things like reading, writing, listening, speaking and transcribing at the same time are more difficult for a dyslexic than for a non-dyslexic. I think this can make Software Carpentry a difficult way for a dyslexic to learn how to write programs, as it requires multi-tasking a variety of activities that are separately quite hard for a dyslexic. The rapid switching between them makes this worse.

Joanna Leng on The Carpentries

Dyslexia and Coding