An educational specialist with the family experience of living with dyslexia and 35+ years of engagement supporting neurodiversity.

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By definition reading has a visual component and what that component looks like today was determined long ago by the printing press. If a reader can manage that formulation of sound/symbol relationships, reading transpires. However, 20% of readers struggle. Historically, they were considered “lazy and not trying hard enough.” Over time, as we learned about the brain, those readers became dyslexic and were determined to have a “reading disorder” — important enough to be characterized in the psychiatric book of mental disorders — DSM-IV. Now, those readers are neuroatypical or neurodivergent or neurodiverse, but still the “problem” resides in the reader.

For more than forty years I have been helping those students learn to read. About 10 years ago, as I sat at my computer re-typing the pages of another book to suit the needs of another young reader who was struggling to get through his assigned reading, I realized that the computer could do what I was doing uniquely for this student. I imagined that the computer could be programed to change the look of text for each reader’s unique, visual perceptual needs. I saw that the difficulties with the visual component of reading could be lifted and instead of the problem residing in the student it could reside in the text and the text could be diversely applied. I had already learned that some students read better from right to left, are aided by increases in the size and spacing of letters and words, are helped when the confusing letters, such as b and d are made easily recognizable, as well as many other changes; AND that those changes easily combined and particular to the student made reading easier and more fluent.

CogniLens provides the quick easy opportunity to change the look of text to suit the individual’s unique visual perceptual needs. Whether you are “dyslexic,” a second language learner trying to read English, or just feel better when text is bigger or looks different, this app will help you.

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