Another brick in the unreadable wall? A simple change towards universal access to information

Dyslexia, yet another brick in the unreadable wall for a great amount of our students. It is possibly one of the most common learning barriers our students can find throughout their learning process, but thanks to ICT applied to our lessons and teaching materials we are one step closer to knocking this wall down for good.

As stated by The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, "Dyslexia affects 20 percent of the population and represents 80–90 percent of all those with learning disabilities. It is the most common of all neuro-cognitive disorders." To have more perspective on this issue, only in Spain in the past course 2020-2021 there were a total of 8.225.340 students registered. This means that approximately 1.643.068 students in Spain have some type of reading disability.

But what does it mean to have dyslexia?

Dyslexia is the difficulty of matching the letters in a text with the sounds they make. People with dyslexia have problems telling different characters (letters and numbers) apart. For instance, the letter E and number 3, or the letters q, p, b and d, among others. The fact that so many characters have similar features renders texts pratically unreadable for a vast amount of students. But there is something we can do!

One simple change to make everything better

Taking into account where exactly the barrier lies will help us take steps closer to finding our way around it.

For the most part, we can apply a different font to our texts so they will become easier to read and understand. Several, useful fonts for this are: Calibri, Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, Trebuchet, Open Sans or the famous Comic Sans. One special mention goes to Dyslexie Font, specially designed to make the different characters more easily recognisable by readers with dyslexia. But is that all?

What else can we do?

· Always use the same font so students can be familiar with it. This will help them work with the text more easily and faster.

· Font size: 12 or 14. · Increased inter-letter and inter-word space.

· Avoid: ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, italics and underlined text, and use bold only to emphasize.

References and further reading:

Dyslexia FAQ. The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. https://dyslexia.yale.edu/dyslexia/dyslexia-faq/

Datos y Cifras. Curso Escolar 2021-2022. Ministerio de Educación y Formación Profesional. https://www.educacionyfp.gob.es/dam/jcr:b9311a59-9e97-45e6-b912-7efe9f3b1f16/datos-y-cifras-2021-2022-espanol.pdf

Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. British Dyslexia Association. https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide

Dyslexia Friendly Font. DyslexieFont. https://www.dyslexiefont.com/