This author's husband celebrated his Bar Mitzvah in the fall of 1960. He learned how to chant his assigned Haftarah from "Sefer Bar Mitzvah Hashalem" (The Complete Bar Mitzvah Book), which contained the text for every Haftarah in the Jewish calendar. Every boy in his Orthodox synagogue was given a copy of this book and told which pages they would use to learn their assigned Haftarah.

This author's husband was a typical learner and had good supervision in his Bar Mitzvah training and does not recall any undo difficulty learning to chant his Haftarah. In contrast, this author's brother-in-law was not able to learn Hebrew as a boy and could not navigate the visual demands of this kind of text. No accommodations for his learning style were available, so he never celebrated his Bar Mitzvah when he was thirteen years old.

As one can see from Figure 1 and Figure 2 (below), the text is legible, but cramped. The typesetting standard for this book caused te'amim (trop marks) ascending above and descending below words to cross the same baseline.

If necessary, vowel marks were moved to accommodate the placement of a ta'am. One can see this effect in Figure 3 below, a snippet of text, which has been magnified to twice its original size and taken from lines 3‑5 from Figure 1 above.

Consider the second word on the first line: יִֽהְיֶה (yih‑yeh). The sheva (two vertical dots ‑ ְ ) under the first letter ה (hay) was moved slightly to the left of center in order to accommodate the placement of the barely legible t'lishah k'tanah ta'am (   ֩  ) placed at the end of the second word הַיָם (ha‑yam) on the second line.

Moreover, on the third line the zakef‑katon ta'am (  ֔ ) over the מ (mem) in the word הָֽאֲדָמָה (ha‑a‑da‑mah) looks identical to the sheva ( ְ ) on the second line under the ו (vav) in the third word וְעוֹף (v'‑of) and almost looks like the two marks could be interpreted visually as one mark if one didn't know how to distinguish between the two of them.

The Haftarah text in Sefer Bar Mitzvah Hashalem is set all in one paragraph with no breaks in the text except for the page boundary. There are no verse numbers in either Hebrew or English. There is a Hebrew designation in small print below the Haftarah title, which indicates that the text comes from Yechezkel - Chapter 38. There is no designation stating that the verses are, in fact, Yechezkel 38:18-39:16.