It’s Valentine’s Day on Monday, and SWD would like to wish everybody a wonderful day full of presents, romance, and love. We hope that you find your special somebody and have a wonderful time together, and make memories that last a lifetime.
Or, if you’re incredibly bitter and jaded like us and can’t wait until you can pop to the store to buy up all of the unsold chocolate at a huge, artery-hardening discount, you might spend some of your weekend torturing yourself by flipping through some dating apps and wondering why you’re still on the market. This is a natural part of the Valentine’s Day trajectory. And sometimes it’s fun to swipe on people to start a conversation about how much you’re enjoying the season of love – it might even be the start of a beautiful friendship and romance where you grow to hate the same things together.
But dating apps aren’t exactly the most dyslexia-friendly of platforms most of the time. A lot of them rely on word-heavy interfaces and typed conversation, some aren’t compatible with screen readers, …and unfortunately, even in an era where the world is much more up to date with neurodiversity and accessibility, say that bad spelling and grammar are a bit of a turn-off.
So what is there to be done?
Although we’re still working on changing the global perceptions of spelling mistakes and letter reversals, we can give you a little primer of what it’s like in the wild world of dating apps when you’ve got literacy differences like dyslexia. Read on for a whistle-stop tour of the good and bad points of some of the most common platforms you might find yourself idly scrolling this Valentine’s Day – and remember, we think you’re fabulous however you spell things or how long it takes you to read a message.
TINDER
First off: Tinder’s ‘Swipe Right’ and ‘Swipe Left’ system isn’t the best for dyslexia accessibility. Many people with dyslexia struggle getting their left and rights …er, right, and the fast-paced nature of the swiping system might mean that a) you accidentally swipe right on an 80-year-old divorcee who’s really into Star Trek, or b) accidentally swipe left on a Henry Cavill lookalike who’s recently opened a puppy sanctuary.
It does get points for ease of access when it comes to registering for an account – each screen is easy to digest, and there’s a ‘card stack’ style design to allow users to focus on one set of information rather than having multiple options on one page. The font is also a pretty dyslexia-friendly serif-free Gotham Rounded, but it’s also compatible with a lot of screen overlays that convert fonts into more comfortable ones like Comic Sans or OpenDyslexia.
The Tinder messaging system is similar to those we’d see on WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, with coloured bright blue bubbles behind the input text that can make some people’s reading experience a little more difficult with no easily discernible option to turn them off. The good news is that your Google Keyboard autocorrect does work within Tinder, so it might make you feel a little more confident when it comes to sending that first message.
BUMBLE
Like Tinder, Bumble offers a simple onboarding process with a minimalist design, and features single-screen questioning to allow you to focus on what you want to say as opposed to a list of forms. Bumble and Tinder aren’t too dissimilar in their UX design once you’ve got down to the swiping system either, but Bumble’s match cards are much simpler than Tinder’s. Whereas on Tinder you’ve got a lot of unlabelled symbols for things like liking and super liking, and a lot of reading, such as location, distance, Spotify interests and Instagram account,Bumble pares down them to a more manageable photo, name and age. The font is slightly bigger too, which can make a difference to some people with literacy differences, but it’s still based on that old problematic swipe system, so it’s something to bear in mind.
BUT here’s the big one: when it comes to messaging people, Bumble has additional features that allow you to take snaps, send voice notes, or even start a phonecall or a video call without having to exchange phone numbers. It’s done on a safe, user-accept system so that you’re never facing a situation where you’re being harassed by people you haven’t okayed, and these no-text features can make a huge difference to somebody with dyslexia and literacy differences. The ability to communicate verbally instead of relying on typed text skills is an important one, and it’s likely to be a huge confidence boost for people who are worried about the societal perception of spelling errors or letter reversals.
HINGE
Hinge loses points for a couple of things from us: it uses a blend of serif and non-serif fonts and italicised and non-italicised fonts in its inferface, and although it’s a pretty plain setup for the most part, there isn’t a dark mode that we’ve found that can change up the interface that way like some of the other apps can. It also relies on white text on glaring purple bubbles in some of its setup and settings screens as well as in its chat function, which isn’t a combination that’s particularly easy on the eye, especially if you’re used to interfaces optimised for dyslexic readers. Your Google Keyboard autocorrect works in here too, though, so there’s that.
Hinge has recently been subject to a UX overhaul in terms of how the app looks onscreen, and this has added a little accessibility-friendliness in that it’s pared down animations and opted for a much more blank-space-heavy thematic layout, but the busy font system might get old quick if you’re a person who particularly struggles with them.
FACEBOOK DATING
Facebook Dating, the new kid on the block. If you manage to get through the reams and reams of people mistakenly trying to sell a table and four chairs on there or look for somebody to paint their kitchen, it’s actually got some pretty nifty accessibility features.
Like Bumble, it gives you the option to move beyond text-based messaging and send over an invitation for an audio call without leaving the app. It’s less pressure than a traditional phonecall and exchanging numbers, and a lot of people online seem to have praised the feature since the dating function launched in late 2020. It’s also easy to set up and use as you can choose to import lists of your likes and interests from your main Facebook platform without typing them out again and without actually having to link the two and make your public Facebook profile known on the dating service.
So, this Valentine’s Day, if you’re swiping alone take some time out to congratulate yourself on your willingness to navigate some interfaces that aren’t truly optimised all in the name of love. And also don’t be afraid to preface a conversation with ‘I’ve got dyslexia!” if you feel comfortable doing so – breaking down the barriers surrounding spelling and grammar in instant messaging is something we need to focus on as a society, as not everybody can spell it right first time, and it’s relatively unimportant that we do so in most cases.
And we’ll just leave this here, if anybody was feeling like they needed a little confidence boost.