From Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia: Developing a New Conceptual Approach to Working with People with Dyslexia

From Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia: Developing a New Conceptual Approach to Working with People with Dyslexia: This is an account of personal narratives shared by several people with dyslexia. Most of these are presented in their original quotation format to provide personal accounts of the lives of people with dyslexia. In this paper the author shares her conversations with her participants. This paper provides an original conceptual model, which is currently been tested empirically. Dyslexia affects the learning process in areas as such reading, and spelling. Conversely abilities or strengths can be seen in other areas, such as developing coping strategies to manage and overcome challenges. This research aims to adapt positive psychology techniques to support individuals with dyslexia. To develop positive psychology interventions, individuals will be helped to discover their five signature strengths. The VIA (Values in Action) Strengths Survey has been hosted in a website which has been developed in the form of a dyslexia user friendly format, such as providing the ability for respondents to change fonts and font sizes, colours and a text to speech option. This paper introduces the theoretical model of ' How to move from Languishing Dyslexia to Thriving Dyslexia'.

Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• Mastering Markdown · GitHub Guides

  In addition to standard styling syntax (bold, italics, lists, ...), "GitHub.com uses its own version of the Markdown syntax that provides an additional set of useful features, many of which make it easier to work with content on GitHub.com" (GitHub Flavored Markdown, ¶1, 2017.09.12).

  tags: formatting GitHub guides HTML hypertext markdown resources styles syntax text

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Diigo bookmarks (weekly)

• OpenDyslexic | Free, OpenSource Dyslexia Typeface

  WordPress homepage introducing special typeface for readers with dyslexia

  tags: dyslexia fonts free readability resources websites

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A few dyslexia [font-related] resources

For the list on the OpenDyslexic’s Related Research page (https://opendyslexic.org/about-2/related-research/), the ThinkMind URL below might work better for item three (Tablet PCs…):

• http://www.thinkmind.org/index.php?view=article&articleid=achi_2012_2_20_20083

That’s the pointer the first author uses:

• http://www.ub.uio.no/english/about/people/ubodigit/andrega/ 
• See Publications: Gasparini, Andrea, & Culén, Alma (2012).

For item four (Typefaces for Dyslexia), I think OpenDyslexic meant _previously_ "at dyslexic.com/fonts.” The link seemed broken; so here’s a new one:

• http://www.iansyst.co.uk/articles/article/articles/2012/10/18/fonts-for-dyslexia

That article recommended ... a BDA Tech page (https://bdatech.org/what-technology/typefaces-for-dyslexia/), which indicated, “It is likely that line length, line spacing and font size are just as important" as fonts, and referred to Bigelow & Holmes 2014 post reviewing research:

• http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/11/typography-dyslexia.html

In 2014, on GitHub, Niclas Darville (ndarville) shared a link to a ready-made Google Scholar search:

• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=dyslexia%20font

Two of the top three hits from that search today are behind paywalls.

French et al. (2013) may shed light on general benefits from alternative fonts. Rello and Baeze-Yates (2013) found, "Sans serif, monospaced and roman font styles significantly improved the reading performance over serif, proportional and italic fonts" (Abstract). 

A Master's thesis from University of Twente by Leeuw (2010) examined one font in particular, Dyslexie. Leeuw's thesis is accessible on Google Drive.

References

• French, M. M. J., Blood, A., Bright, N. D., Futak, D., Grohmann, M. J., Hasthorpe, A., … Tabor, J. (2013). Changing Fonts in Education: How the Benefits Vary with Ability and Dyslexia. The Journal of Educational Research, 106(4), 301–304. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2012.736430

• Leeuw, R. de. (2010, December 21). Special font for dyslexia? Retrieved from http://essay.utwente.nl/60474/

• Rello, L., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2013). Good Fonts for Dyslexia. In Proceedings of the 15th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (p. 14:1--14:8). New York, NY, USA: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2513383.2513447

Alternative webpage readability extensions for Google Chrome

Searching for a replacement for Clearly, which has disappeared from Chrome extensions, I found a pointer to the following GitHub page in a comment on an Apps User Group post: 

• Alternatives for the Clearly readability extension (Eric Curts, 2016.01.21).

• GitHub - ZachSaucier/Just-Read: A customizable read mode extension for Chrome

(Zach Saucier, 2016.10.28)

A few alternatives mentioned either in Curts' blog post and embedded YouTube video about alternatives (Control Alt Achieve, 2016.01.20), or in comments on it, included:

• BeeLine Reader (http://www.beelinereader.com/)
• Featured in Curts' blog post and YouTube video
• https://youtu.be/Q0sLceZAPDY (2016.01.20)
• 3.9 star rating by 150 (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06)
• Just Read: 
• Maintained (Unknown, 2016.10.27)
• Mercury Reader (https://mercury.postlight.com/reader/)
• 3.9 star rating by 1426  (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06)
• Readability:
• Obsolete (Michael, 2017.03.21)
• Reportedly replaced by Mercury Reader (Anonymous, 2017.05.21)
• The Readability site said, "[C]heck out Mercury Reader" (c. 2016).

At present, Easy Reader:

• 4.7 stars by 472 of 30,587 users (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06) 

seems to be right up there with Just Read:

• 4.7 stars by 376 of 72, 480 users (Chrome Web Store, 2017.09.06).

If you favor either Easy Reader or Just Read, please share your rationale(s) in comments on this post.

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