Working with dyslexia

You can read this.

When I used to teach psychology, I would present the above image to my students and their minds would immediately wonder if this is how someone with dyslexia experiences the world. Luckily, I could tell them first-hand that this is not dyslexia.

This isn’t easier to read for someone with dyslexia, in fact, it’s much harder. The reason why any person is able to read this paragraph is due to Gestalt psychology, which generally states that the whole (a word) is greater than the sum of its parts (letters). This refers to the fact that we can decipher meaning out of the whole picture, but struggle if we only get a snippet.

Although Gestalt psychology does not offer an explanation for the dyslexic experience, it does offer insight into why people often assume that ‘this must be what it’s like for someone with dyslexia’. They haven’t had the opportunity to get the full story.

So then, what is dyslexia?

It’s a waiting game. In every professional environment, I am faced with the daunting task of when it will become ruthlessly apparent that I am dyslexic. To truly explain my experience, it’s helpful to understand the two main ‘categories’ of symptoms associated with dyslexia: visual-perceptual symptoms and phonological symptoms.

When you think of dyslexia, you’re likely imagining visual-perceptual symptoms. This individual reads words backward and struggles with mirror-image letters, such as b’s and d’s.

What you may not know is that someone with dyslexia may or may not experience this phenomenon. It’s more likely that they are experiencing phonological symptoms, which is also wreaking havoc on their outgoing emails.

Phonological symptoms refer to how individuals may struggle to process, store (in memory), and/or retrieve phonemes. If this is meaningless to you, imagine what your troubleshooting process is like when you come across an unknown word while reading. The first thing most individuals do is try to sound it out by breaking up the word into smaller bits (likely phonemes). However, this is not available to an individual with dyslexia and if it is, this individual will exhaust extra cognitive resources to accomplish the task of sounding out a word.

This becomes quite superfluous and the enjoyment of reading is often lost as the images created by previous sentences drift out of the mind in order to engage in the dissection of the unknown word. My attention and memory resources are charged with deciphering each unidentified word that crosses my path. I soon become exhausted and have lost the context of what I was reading.

So what do you do about it?

Apart from attempting to explain my experience, I’ve devised some handy solutions to circumvent my shortfalls.

1. Big font with tails, such as Times New Roman or Georgia (Serif fonts), are easier for me to read. I have some visual-perceptual symptoms that become more apparent when my cognitive resources are scarce or overextended (e.g tired, distracted, or multitasking). The fonts that have ‘tails’, as I call it, provide me with mental short-cuts so I can easily pick out distinctions amongst letters. With that being said, Calibri, Arial, and Consolas (Sans Serif) fonts are nightmares as these fonts have consistent heights and widths of the letters. This may not be something you notice if you don’t have dyslexia, so think about words in ALL CAPS. Fully capitalized words also have an even height and width distribution of each letter, making them hard to read regardless of font. Tails make it easier to differentiate the letters and grab the word as a whole. As someone who spends a majority of my day coding (which is typically in Consolas), I often resort to color preferences to highlight key symbols and words to help me.
2. Reading everything out loud. This includes my own reports, emails, slack or text messages, or anything of utmost importance. I believe this solution only works because of the excessive time I’ve spent asking people to break down words for me.
3. Say it with me. I spend a lot of time asking individuals around me to say a word for me and if I’m comfortable, I’ll ask them to help me say it by breaking it down into components. This can take a lot of trust. I often struggle with feelings of embarrassment and shame when I can’t physically say a word that I, not only know the meaning of, but have used in my writings (or worse have said recently but can’t access how to say the word in the moment for some undisclosed reason). I learned this approach in my numerous sciences courses (specifically anatomy) where everyone had to use this approach in order to pronounce these novel terms.
4. AI-Technology. There are lots of (free) AI-powered products out there that can help. I personally use Grammarly to help grab silly mistakes; however, do not become too dependent as Grammarly is often incorrect! I like Grammarly because it’s over-sensitive and has pretty good sentiment analysis so I’m more likely to catch a mistake.

Many people may laugh when someone stammers or mispronounces a word. For someone with dyslexia who is trying to hide it, this can be mortifying. However, everyone mispronounces words and sometimes it really is funny. But remember, just as Gestalt psychology (which does not explain dyslexia) suggests, you are more than the sum of your parts. Dyslexia is one part of who I am, but never the whole picture.