Section one
Where we are
Micah's handwritten notes and the typed review guide have been read against each other, mark by mark. Six of the seventeen review questions turn out to be answered in her own handwriting. Eleven still need her. Five marks or rules never made it into the transcription at all.
Review questions already answered in Micah's notes. We can confirm rather than ask.
Questions that still need her, including two she flagged herself.
Marks or rules present in her notes but missing from the typed guide.
Direct conflict between two of her source sheets on how to mark star.
What this document is
A place to put everything in one view so the call can be spent deciding rather than hunting. It holds the organised notes, the mark rendering tests, the typeface evidence, the scope options and the open questions.
What it is not
Not a prototype, not a design direction, and not a proposal. No screen here is a claim that a feature will exist. The one honest visual claim in the whole document is Section 3, where the digital code marks really are drawn the way a real product would draw them.
Suggested order for the call
1. Who is this for first, and does the product open with screening, with learning, or with converting materials. Everything downstream depends on it.
2. Scope triage, using Section 5 live. Sorting the nine areas takes about fifteen minutes and protects the budget.
3. Code marks, using Section 3. The eleven open questions are the real engineering spec.
Parked for next week: terminology and naming. Cheap to gather later, and it only makes sense once the audience is chosen.
Two things to ask Micah for
Her scope and sequence. Her margin notes reference "comes at the end of II B" and "2018 schedule III A". There is a teaching sequence behind these pages that we have not seen, and it is probably the most useful document she could hand us. Any learning path, practice set or progress model would be built on it.
Her own recording of the ng and nk sounds. She wrote "call me for this" beside it in her notes. A short voice memo of her saying , and settles the question faster than any amount of writing.
Source lineage: her six handwritten pages are her own teaching notes, built on the Orton-Gillingham approach she is certified in. Three further pages are printed handouts from a published programme, so we work from her notes and her wording rather than reproducing those sheets.
Section two
The map
The journey below is the one described in the handoff. It is a good description of a person's experience. It is not automatically a good navigation menu, and the difference between those two things is the first decision to make.
The journey, as described
Highlighted: the two steps that describe what Micah actually does today, by hand, for real students.
The front door question
If the journey becomes the navigation, screening becomes the front door by default rather than by decision. Screening is the piece with the most clinical exposure, the longest validation path and the least certainty. Converting materials is the piece Micah already does by hand, has an obvious buyer, and carries no diagnostic risk. Worth choosing on purpose.
Navigation hypotheses to test
Three menus from the handoff. Treat every label as a question. The confidence tag is our read, not a decision.
Public site
- Start Here wording
- Screening risk
- Learn the Code strong
- Tools vague
- Resources
- For Educators strong
- About
Learner workspace
- Home
- My Learning
- Practice
- Progress measure what
- My Records privacy
- Saved Materials
- Account and Accessibility do not bury
Educator workspace
- Home
- Convert Material the wedge
- Students child data
- Assignments
- Progress
- Saved Materials
- Resources
The nine areas, and how confident we are
| Area | What it needs before it can be built | Confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site | A chosen audience and a chosen promise. Cannot be written before that. | blocked on audience |
| Screening | Validated instrument, scoring, thresholds, specialist sign off, and careful language about what it is not. | high risk |
| Results | Everything screening needs, plus a considered position on what a result may say. | high risk |
| Resources | A decision on whether this is a library, a guided next step, or a directory. Three different products. | undefined |
| Learn the code | The eleven open mark questions, plus her scope and sequence. | clearest |
| Conversion tool | Rule order, human correction model, source formats, and a copyright position on uploaded material. | clearest value |
| Practice | The code content first. Practice without an approved code is decoration. | depends |
| Progress | A decision on what is worth measuring, which nobody has made yet. | undefined |
| Portable records | A privacy and retention posture. The heaviest compliance surface in the whole idea. | heaviest |
Section three
Mark lab
Micah's handwriting on the left, our digital rendering on the right. Every mark here is drawn by the interface rather than typed, which is the only way most of them can exist on screen. The question for each row is simple: is this her mark, yes or no.
Tier 1. Ordinary characters. Any decent typeface can show them.
Tier 2. Simple styling. Underlines and strikes.
Tier 3. Drawn shapes over the letters. Arcs, boxes, brackets, curves.
Tier 4. Does not exist as a character anywhere. Must be drawn.
Vowel quantity
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten silent e row. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten open unaccented vowel row. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
The printed vowel sheet showing erase, promote and unite with the modified macron. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten combinations row showing star with two dots. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten hard and soft g examples. Click the image to enlarge.
Stress and combination
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten r-controlled combinations with arcs. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten diphthongs with arcs beneath. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten ank, ink and onk with the q-curve. Click the image to enlarge.
Silent letters and sound units
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten igh, ch and tch examples. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten dge and ge examples. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten vowel digraph examples. Click the image to enlarge.
Structural marks
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten boxed -ed suffixes. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten final stable syllable brackets. Click the image to enlarge.
Micah's handwriting
Micah's handwritten hard c with k-back and soft c with cedilla. Click the image to enlarge.
The one direct conflict
Her handwritten page one marks star with the two-dot mark over the a. The printed code-mark sheet says ar and or take a tittle when the sound changes. Two different marks for the same word, depending on which sheet you trust.
or
Missing from the transcription entirely
Voiced s. Her page three opens with "s makes 2 sounds, s equals sock, s equals nose" and gives the z-sound its own mark. It is not in the legend.
Vowel y. A whole sub-system: plus her note that words do not normally begin with vowel y. Absent from the guide.
The arc as a general combination mark, and the silent partner inside vowel teams. Both shown above.
Section four
Font lab
The typeface switcher in the top bar changes this entire document, not just the samples. That is deliberate. Accessibility that lives in a settings page is not accessibility.
The finding that decides this quickly
Every candidate handles marks that sit above a letter. They separate below it. Atkinson Next carries 15 combining diacritics and not one of them sits below the baseline, so it cannot compose a macron below or a dot below, and it has no eng. Andika, built by SIL specifically for literacy learners, carries 106 and is the only candidate with marks on both sides of the letter, which is what Micah’s system asks for.
Measured coverage, read from the font files themselves
| Typeface | Combining marks | Breve, macron, tilde | Eng (ŋ) | Macron below | Headroom above x-height |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Andika fullest | 106 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Very generous |
| Inclusive Sans | 19 | Yes | Yes | Yes | Generous |
| Atkinson Next | 15 | Yes | No | No | Moderate |
Counts are of characters in the combining diacritical marks block, read directly from the font files in the project folder. Headroom matters because Micah stacks up to three marks on one letter.
Why this is less fatal than it looks
Every mark in Section 3 is drawn by the interface rather than composed by the font, so the product is not actually limited by the typeface's diacritic table. Coverage still matters for three things: what happens when someone copies marked text out, what a screen reader receives, and what prints. Worth choosing a font that can represent the system honestly even though we draw it ourselves.
The same marked words, three ways
Single-storey a and g, which matter when you are teaching letter identity. Built for literacy learners.
Adult in tone, wide apertures, full coverage. Reads as capable rather than as a school worksheet.
Strongest character disambiguation of the three. Tighter headroom for stacked marks.
Character confusion test
The characters Micah named as hard to tell apart, plus the mirrored pairs that come up in teaching.
Il1 O0 rn m
b d p q
Il1 O0 rn m
b d p q
Il1 O0 rn m
b d p q
Il1 O0 rn m
b d p q
Stacking stress test
The worst case in her system: three marks on one letter group, at reading size and at practice size.
If the marks collide at the small size, the practice screens and printed worksheets are where it will hurt first.
What we would propose, pending Micah
Andika for anything marked, because it was designed for exactly this reader and has the letterforms teaching depends on. Inclusive Sans for interface text, because it stays adult and does not turn the product into a children's worksheet. Both remain user-switchable, since Micah's own point stands: no single typeface works for everyone, and bottom-weighted faces like Dyslexie help some readers and not others.
Section five
Scope sorter
Nine areas, four buckets. Sort them live during the call. The summary at the bottom updates as you go and can be copied straight into notes.
Summary
Select the text below to copy it.
A framing that usually helps
Foundation is what everything else depends on and what cannot be undone cheaply: the approved code, the audience, the accessibility standard, the privacy posture. First release is the smallest thing that solves one real problem for one real person. Later is genuinely valuable and genuinely not now. Not needed is the most valuable bucket in the room and the one clients are most reluctant to use.
Section six
Decision log
The seventeen questions from the review guide, plus what we found in her handwriting, plus the new questions this pass raised. Answered ones are listed first so the call can skip them.