Dyslexia Friendly Numerals

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If you clicked on this, you're either interested in what I meant by that, or perhaps have/know someone with dyslexia, possibly recognizing the issues with inverting/flipping arabic numerals causing a complete change of the information presented for some people.


My girlfriend has dyslexia, but beyond some uh, Schlingeren(sp?) type learning in a private school stint, she never really had someone try to help her learn things in her way, then translate those things to the "normal" ones. It's just force her to learn the normal way until she can perform at an acceptable level.


We were talking about math, and I mentioned this guy who has unbelievable mathematical skills because he sees numbers as having different textures and shapes.

She clicked on that immediately, telling me that four is beige and feels like sandpaper.


I sat and thought about it, then started tinkering with ways to fix this problem for her.



Not only do those satisfy my mind incredibly well, when she looked at them I saw her light up, she loved roman numerals, but the issues with reversing arabic ones left her despondent to a subject she actually really loves, math.


Figured I'd share this, see what you folks think of them, if you've heard of other dyslexic friendly numeral systems, I'd love to know more.

Last edited by justMax on 29 Nov 2009, 7:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm reminded of the one room in Avalon, an episode of Stargate. Basically, it was a puzzle in which you had to arrange 8 bricks in order or be crushed by the ceiling. As it turns out, the bricks were actually the numbers 1 to 8, but reflected over a vertical axis. For example, 8 looked like 88, kind of like a clover. The number 1 was sort of like an arrow, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, my point is that with the 'reflect' system, anyone could read the numbers with only one simple instruction instead of learning an entirely new symbol for each number.

Here are examples, courtesy of Gateworld:

True, but that is far more strokes to write the symbols.

Plus, 8 doesn't encode what 8 is, the shape of 8 doesn't relate to the shape of 2 in any way.

1 is straight with barbs, 2 is round and straight with a sharp corner, 3 is round with a sharp corner, 4 is all sharp corners and straight lines, 5 is round and straight with sharp corners, 6 is round with a loose bar, 7 is straight with a sharp corner, 8 is round and closed, 9 is round with a loose bar.

Additionally, the direction the symbols face is specifically important, but arbitrarily chosen.

2 faces a certain way, 5 seems to face the other way, making 5 look the same way as 2 appears to transform the symbols into each other, that is incredibly confusing for some readers, forcing them to try to learn an arbitrary left/right distinction which their brain simply may not be wired to make.

When she explained dyslexia, and I considered my own "strange" wiring, I immediately sympathized with that.


There is no rhyme or reason to the symbols used in arabic numerals.


A dot, a dash, a longer line rotated vertically, a dash + a vertical line, two vertical lines, two vertical lines + a dash, two longer lines rotated horizontally, two longer lines + a dash rotated vertically, two vertical lines + two lines rotated horizontally, two horizontal dashes + a longer vertical through them.

It doesn't matter if they "face" left or right, two horizontal lines with a vertical dash on one end is always a 7. A square is always an 8, a vertical line can not be confused for two vertical lines with a dash on one end, where 2 and 5 can be confused for each other.


The relationships encode addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, in a way where once you learn the way to rotate and split the symbols, simply doing that provides you with the answer instead of sitting and counting up arbitrarily large values, or rote memorization of times tables.


Incidentally, at her suggestion I decided to call them Courtney's Numerals.

justMax...It sounds like your GF has a kind of synaesthesia which I wouldn't necessarily think of as a problem. I was going to mention I transpose numbers all the time and ask if that was a kind of dyslexia but the synaesthesia is much more interesting.

http://cytowic.net/

Btw, my real name is Max, you can call me Max, just Max is fine.

If there's another Max in the topic though it helps to clarify.

I usually use the name Max™ cause most places accept the trademark symbol as an input, and it's rarely taken. Couldn't use the ™ here though, to my chagrin.


I'm highly synesthetic, as I explained in the sensations thread, I see/feel the shapes of notes in music, and certain shapes just overwhelm me through headphones/good surround sound.

I like the symbols you have created and once learned they would be helpful except that communication involves everyone agreeing on the symbols and my problems inverting numbers was related to a job where I had to write down numbers for others as well as myself .

I was always an avid reader so assumed that I was not dyslexic until I learned that the reason I can read but not spell may be because I am not actually reading letters but the whole words general shape as if it were a picture....if that makes sense .

Oh, the word shape preventing spelling errors makes sense, totally understand how you can do that.

This though, with a better grasp of the concepts behind the number you could calculate better, and learning to convert them into arabic numerals becomes the hardest part, instead of trying to manipulate the arabic numerals directly.

You may still make mistakes while converting, but they'll be far less severe than one made while calculating, much easier to catch as well.

I see no pattern whatsoever in your choice of symbols - especially not your specialisation of the zero digit (which seems reminiscent of Mayan notation), and your lack of forethought for other bases... but there again, I'm a mathematician.

(On thinking about it, I meant to say the Sumerian zero.)

Think about it like a mental abacus, but one you can jot down on scratch paper rapidly and easily.

I'm more of a physicist, though I've been reteaching myself math til I feel comfortable with it, these are very suitable for the way my slight dyscalculia works, and so far have been extremely readable to other dyscalc's I've gotten feedback from.


When I work with arabic numerals, I convert them into shapes that I label somewhat like an algebraic variable, except I encode the value into the shape, like mixing x or n with 5 or 327.

Then I manipulate the shape, expanding it, slicing it, adding others onto it, taking others away from it, and convert that back into arabic.


It is utterly impractical for writing though, as I use rather synesthetic spatial sense cues subconsciously when distinguishing between them, a 3 is flat, a 30 is deeper, a 300 is larger but the same depth, a 3000 is larger and deeper, but I put it in a recursive sort of form where the visual space covered by 3000 is the same as 3, it's just got finer structure inside of it.


The shapes mostly vary though by traits like even/odd, vertical/horizontal, round/sharp, type things. The shape of the AN (arabic numeral) 3 isn't in any way represented by the mental shape I use, so it is jarring to transition between them. The shape of the CN three is translatable easily into the mental shape due to how I encoded the value into the steps of producing it, eliminating the static.

I love being cryptic, so thanks for these max.

They click in your head too?

Been trying to pick up more feedback from dyslexi/calc folks.

Had a bunch of "there's nothing wrong with (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)" responses... I'm like 'you're not dyslexi/calc are you?' "no, does it matter?"... lol, that's kinda the point.

No, thank you. I'd rather not confuse a tool useful for calculation, with a notation that seems quite arbitrary.

BTW. How do you distinguish four (||) from twenty-two (||), and twenty-four (|||) from forty-two (|||) or two hundred and twenty-two (|||)?

Arabic numerals are arbitrary too, but they're needlessly difficult for people with dyscalc issues. Sat around all day working math in them with my notebook upstairs, they remove the step of converting how I see number concepts in my head into arabic ones.

42: || |, 24: | ||, 2,242: |, | || |

The spacing is simple enough when handwritten, you wouldn't stack two of the | two lines directly side by side, and doing so implies that you added them to make a four. So much easier to read a page full of them though, and I don't even have severe dyscalc issues.



A one to one translation with that orientation, a way it could be used to help kids encode the values in their heads.


The mental abacus is great, but you could do the same manipulations with these direct representations of the values, and jot them down on paper as well. This would be particularly helpful vs an abacus if you had severe left/right orientation problems, you still need to keep the abacus oriented in your head. Reversal of that is not impossible, and it could change the values.

Reversing these can not change the values they represent, there are not as many ways to do that with low stroke counts.

No. They have a perfectly good history.

They are not ambiguous, in the way your replacements are.

Writing the Arabic digits on top of yours doesn't do anything other than that.

As I understand your argument, the only aspect of Arabic numerals that you have issue with is the rotation of a 6 to a 9. I'll conceded that. So we could just replace one of those with a newish symbol. Maybe that's why I (and others) tend to write a 6 just like that, but my 9s are more backward P shaped.

Having said that, I guess you now want to replace the alphabet, upper and lower case, with letters that are never ambiguous under any transformation. This too can be done. I'd suggest the use of the set of planar graphs with five nodes, say, as a possible candidate.

You can teach kids to trace the shape of syllables instead of letters by themselves, solves the problem there.

2 and 5, 1 and 7, 3 and 8, 6 and 9, all are similar enough to cause issues.

Incidentally, besides 1 and 2, even numbers have parallel lines, or in the case of 8, two sets of connected parallel lines, and odd all have perpendicular ones. 1 and 2 are also perpendicular to each other.

I have no idea what the shape of a syllable might be.