Dyslexia Tool Suggestion

[EdEarl]

My wife, a special-ed teacher has a student she thinks is dyslexic. She is not trained to teach dyslexics, and thinks this student should be tested for dyslexia. He is a challenge for her, so she asked me if there was some kind of glasses that could straighten out the letters for him.

 

I said no, but a computer program might be made that reads pages with a camera, converts the picture into characters (OCR), and presents him with the words with the characters rearranged to help him. In other words, if he confuses d as b and b as d, then the program would change them to whatever he needs.

Such a program would need a training session with each user to learn what each dyslexic person needs.

 

IDK if this idea would work, but thought it might be worth some PhD candidate evaluating the idea.

 

If this is an original idea, I hereby donate it to the public domain. If it is not original, I'd be interested to learn how well or poorly it works.

[Endy0816]

There are actually glasses out there, from reading looks like limited scope though.

 

Project sounds interesting. There are other forms of assistive tech but this looks a unique idea.

[Klaynos]

Often coloured overlays or coloured paper helps. The best colour changes person to person and can even change over time. Worth trying.

[jajrussel]

My first encounter with dyslexia was when I got a job that required writing down large numbers. I made it through school, and the military not knowing I had a problem. I am guessing that anxiety can heighten the problem.

 

I got lucky. The manager had a son who was dyslexic, so she knew what she was looking at when she saw it. Half the number would be written left to right, the other half right to left. Sometimes the whole number would be right to left. Sometimes only two numbers would be transposed.

 

It was her patience and a lot of writing, and erasing to write again, that eventually won the day.

 

It was frustrating for me because I would be so confident that I had gotten every number right.

 

Not once did she show any kind of impatience. She would simply point out my mistake, then have me go write down the number again. Constantly encouraging, saying take your time and concentrate, this is what you did wrong this time, think about what you did wrong when you check your number, then check again that every number is written in the right order left to right.

 

It was three weeks before I managed to get it right on the first trip, only to get it wrong the next day. Around four months later writing the numbers and getting the numbers right the first time was no longer an issue, but it took a long time before I could write a long number, check it once, and feel confident that it was right.

 

Even today I find myself repeating a number I have written down over and over until something distracts me.

 

Patience, understanding, and a lot of encouragement will get her, and her student through the roughest part.

 

My problem was with numbers, so I imagine it might be different with reading. Maybe something that focuses the readers attention on each word one word at a time in such a way that the reader can see that the word is part of a sentence, but can only clearly make out the one word, if word order is the problem.

 

For letters, maybe plastic letters laid out in the silliest of ways. The letter is on its side, it is upside down, it is backwards, and a game is made of getting the letters positioned the way they should be so that they can spell a word, spell out a word like cab, but place the b sideways or upside down then have the student reposition the b until it is right.

 

As far as a program that inverts the letters to meet the students needs, I think it would be better to place a bar under the b to distinguish it from a d. Then it becomes b for bar. Something easy to remember.

 

Best of luck to both teacher and student.

[Endy0816]

 

Half the number would be written left to right, the other half right to left. Sometimes the whole number would be right to left. Sometimes only two numbers would be transposed.

 

Was there any sort of consistency to the changes or were they random?

[jajrussel]

I am working on 35 year old memory here, but the only thing consistent at first was that most of the numbers would be wrong, usually the last four digits.

 

56637844 would come out 56634487 most often. 44873665 on occasion, and a two digit transposition could occur just about any time.

 

I had to learn to think in sets of 4 & 4, or 4 & 3. Then I had to learn to stick with those sets. I also had to be careful not to use a 4 & 3 set on an eight digit number. Then I had to be careful not to start with a three set, which I tried to do a lot at first. Then one day I caught myself using a 5 & 2 set, which scared me. I checked that number a lot of times convinced that I would find a mistake that wasn't there.

 

I had no clue at first, but basically what I was doing was reading, and writing the the first part of the number in the right order. Then knowing that there were three to four digits left, look up and start reading from the right, and counting from right as I did so. Then I would check my work by making sure I had the right amount of numbers, then assume at that point that everything was good. It never occurred to me that I was reading right to left as I counted. So that part was most consistent.