Are the Colors of RexLex Distracting to Readers?

Initially, color text can actually be distracting because the colors themselves are, at first, voting on random memories and not ones that have been internally indexed to letters. But this is just because they are new and unknown.

If you were to play a video game whereby you scored for each common object you identified within a minute, you would obviously score higher if the objects were in color, and you would not find color distracting at all, because you know the color of many objects. Similarly, you don’t find color distracting in your everyday life, and use color to your advantage. You already know that tangerines, carrots and pumpkins are orange, so this creates clarity when walking through the produce aisle. Once readers know that H, G, L, W are orange, with that same level of instant certainty, the color info will be clarifying and not distracting. For this reason, we recommend students begin with the RexLex games, and focus on learning the colors, rather than dive directly into reading. Gamifying the learning process (Phrase Match Game Demo Video) makes it easy and fun. More at Learning RexLex.

What Platforms does RexLex work on?

RexLex is currently available for beta testing. There are extension for Chromium based Browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave) and it can be installed without an Extension directly into Firefox. Versions are available for Windows 10 & 11, MacOS and Chromebook. A version for iOS (iPad and iPhone) is currently being developed and will be available in early 2026. If you are interesting in being a beta tester, please Contact Us.

How will Color work for the ColorBlind?

RexLex was carefully designed for colorblind readers as well! Read more about it on our ColorBlind page.

What happens when users get used to reading in Color and they have to go back to B&W out in the world?

You are still better off than before. Let me explain.

1. RexLex preserves all of the shape information that’s available with B&W text - the color is purely supplemental. We explored the idea of altering the shapes from their most common forms, which would have allowed us to easily resolve shape conflicts with shape changes, but we rejected this idea precisely because we didn’t want to create a ‘private language’ which would differ from public text. When supplemental closed captioning is turned off you are no worse off than before it existed. You simply fall back on the shapes that are still available, as before. B&W movies remove our ability to distinguish by color, but we have the same shape distinctions as ever. Our minds organize our internal memories by all of the dimensions available to us. When we see an object, we don’t expect to see all of it, and in fact we pride ourselves on being able to identify objects with limited clues. “I can name that song in 3 notes”. The whole value of the identification process is to be able to recall the unseen portions from the few portions seen. We can identify the cat by just its tail or which person is nearby just by the sound of their footsteps.

2. RexLex helps the brain prevent crossed memories. Every time you misperceive something there’s an opportunity for the brain to cross memories. The continuous inability for dyslexics to reliably separate letters and words during perception, can carry over into how the brain internally organizes memories into clearly separate memory clusters.

3. RexLex helps keep memories from being compressed. Memories fade because of compression - the brain determines memories are not sufficiently unique and thus it can save space by blending them together. This works well for natural data, as we can’t remember separate memories for each blade of grass. But this can also cause the brain to compress similar shapes together. RexLex colors provide anchors for the brain - additional clearly unique characteristics which tell the brain that the memories are not so similar that they can be compressed into one.