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"Dyslexia is the most common cause of reading, writing, and spelling difficulties" (Society for Neuroscience, Brain Research Success Stories).

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Starting June 2023, Student Access has been able to count students newly registered with them by diagnosis. Over time, UNE will be able to get an accurate count of students with dyslexia who register with SAC.

Between 5 and 15% of Americans (14.5 - 43.5 million) have dyslexia (Society for Neuroscience, Brain Research Success Stories). Yale Dyslexia estimates that 20% of people have dyslexia.

2214 undergraduates were enrolled in UNE courses in Fall 2023. A conservative estimate using the Society for Neuroscience ratio suggests that there might be 111 undergraduate students with dyslexia at UNE. There might be as many as 332 undergraduates with dyslexia.

There is some evidence that suggests that systematic approaches to supporting students with learning disabilties result in persistence and retention gains:

"Evidence from propensity analyses indicated that students with disabilities who had accessed universally available and/or disability-related supports were significantly more likely to persist in their 2- or 4-year college programs. Additionally, retention rates were higher for those who had accessed universally-available supports only, such as writing and math centers, which don’t require disclosure of a disability" (Newman, L. A., Madaus, J. W., Lalor, A. R., & Javitz, H. S. [2020] https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000170)

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Fact Sheet for Anyone Teaching Students with Dyslexia

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Fact Sheet for Anyone Teaching Students with Dyslexia

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Difficulties Associated with Dyslexia in Students

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Difficulties Associated with Dyslexia in Students

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Kirk and Reid (2003)

difficulties in reading accuracy;

speed‐of‐reading difficulties;

persistent spelling errors;

difficulties with grammatical structure;

sequencing difficulties in words and in ideas;

need to reread text;

difficulties planning and organising written work;

difficulty memorising facts;

difficulty memorising formulae;

taking notes in lectures;

planning essays;

study skills;

transferring learning from one situation to another;

noting inferences in texts;

written examinations, particularly if timed;

difficulty with technical words;

difficulty identifying main points;

short attention span;

difficulty with proofreading;

unable to read aloud;

poor sequencing, history, events, ordering information.

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For dyslexic readers, reading takes much longer and requires much greater effort than for neurotypical readers (Shaywitz and Shaywitz 439).

Dyslexic writers often have very slow composition rates due to overloaded working memory, making writing a grueling hard-to-sustain process (Herbert 850).

Dyslexia can be associated with stigmatizing writing issues, such as wrong word and spelling errors, disorganization, and underdeveloped ideas (Herbert 843).

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Shaywitz and Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 2022

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Accommodations must be accompanied by UDL best practices to ensure effective, equitable, and inclusive access to learning materials and spaces for dyslexic students.

Students often bear the lion's share of the burden of advocating for their accommodations.

Despite appropriate support services being available, students' knowledge of the services available to them is dependent on meeting the right people.

Some learning materials used in some classes don't work with text-to-speech and Immersive Reader-type assistive technologies.

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Inability to immediately process and respond to printed or otherwise inaccessible materials handed out or projected in class.

Need for extra time puts students with dyslexia out of sync with classroom activities, forcing them to multi-task or miss information when learning activities require them to read.

Dyslexic writers often have very slow composition rates due to overloaded working memory, making writing a grueling hard-to-sustain process and in-class writing particularly challenging.

Use of assistive technologies "outs" them as dyslexic in class.

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Feelings (and reality) of being behind, being unfairly disadvantaged.

Feelings of being misperceived as stupid, incapable, unmotivated, slow, needy, demanding, or fragile.

Frequent feelings of frustration, anxiety, stress, and anger which affect students' academic performance, relationship with faculty & university.

Feelings of being bothersome or a burden to faculy.

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Few assistive technologies provided to students or facilitated for them by UNE Student Access Center outside of the testing center.

SAC provides Kurzweil text-to-speech software in the testing center, noise cancellation headphones, ear plugs, and Livescribe Echo smart-ish pens

Students are responsible for knowing which technologies might work for them and securing, installing, and learning how to use them themselves.

Students often need more than one assistive technology

Most assistive technologies are not free. The best, most useful technologies, have somewhat substantial, ongoing subscription fees.

Free and low-cost apps sometimes don't work particularly well, adding to the burden of accessing course materials.

Few UNE photocopiers, scanners, and workstations are equipped with OCR technology or the software necessary to create ADA-compliant PDF/UA pdfs.

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FERPA prevents accommodations letters from the Student Access Center from revealing students' diagnoses, so unless students self-disclose, faculty may not know that students with dyslexia are in the course.

Already burdened faculty have limited institutional support or access to technologies and services for retroactively converting inaccessible materials to accessible ones and may not know how to use technologies to create accessible versions of new materials.

Not all learning materials are readily available in digital/accessible format.

Limited guidance on teaching or supporting students with dyslexia.

A possible lack of understanding of dyslexia may lead to decisions and actions that damage relationships with students and undermine student learning opportunities. It

may influence faculty decisions on granting accommodations, facilitating access, and providing support.

may influence faculty judgment on the length of time it takes students with dyslexia to compose text

may result in faculty misinterpretation of dyslexia-related surface-level errors such as misspellings and wrong word errors as evidence of sloppiness or carelessness.

may cause misinterpretation of students' intelligence, motivation, or abilities.

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This activity simulates the time it takes a person with dyslexia to read, not the literal experience of dyslexia. Video by Kellane's Advocacy

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This activity simulates the effort it takes a person with dyslexia to read, not the literal experience of dyslexia. Video by Kellane's Advocacy

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This video offers a simulation of dyslexia and presents dyslexia from a strengths rather than a deficit perspective.

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Dyslexia Simulation--What it's Like to Be Dyslexic.

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This was very easy for a student with dyslexia to read

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This was very easy for a student with dyslexia to read

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Students with dyslexia

Students with reading-processing disorders

Low-vision readers

Multi-lingual learners

Others with perhaps undiagnosed needs

Anyone who prefers to engage with text in an alternative format

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Improved retention

Greater student satisfaction

Tests model for other similar programs to address routine obstacles of other populations

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Factsheet for Anyone Teaching Students with Dyslexia

CAST Guidelines for Universal Design for Learning

The Center for Universal Design in Education

UNE Libraries Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Resources Collection, including Neurodiversity

UNE Neurodiversity Professional Learning Community's Resources List

Embracing Dyslexia - youTube channel with great interviews

Bookshare – People with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy, and other reading barriers can customize their experience to suit their learning style and find virtually any book they need for school, work, or the joy of reading.

Learning Ally – human-narrated audio textbooks and literature

National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (Library of Congress)

UNE Library digital collections.

The Study Skills Toolkit for Students with Dyslexia - requires UNE libraries login.

Ghotit Dyslexia Keyboard – The keyboard predicts words by using Ghotit Quick Spell Word-Prediction, the technology designed for writers with typing issues and phonetic writers; this technology increases writing speed and successfully predicts intended words with instant correction of the first misspelled letters.

Ghotit Real Writer and Reader – reading and writing support software from Ghotit. Useful for people with dyslexia, L2 (ELL) readers and writers, and maybe dysgraphia.

TextHelp Read&Write – a literacy support tool that offers help with everyday tasks like reading text out loud, understanding unfamiliar words, researching assignments and proofing written work.

Co:Writer – Co:Writer helps give you the words and phrases you’re intending as you type—even if your grammar and spelling are way off. Just type a letter or two and Co:Writer predicts words and phrases in real time. Companion to Snap&Read.

Snap&Read – Snap&Read is a powerful suite of tools to help with reading challenges. It includes a text-to-speech tool, a snapshot tool to turn inaccessible text on the web to machine-readable text, an annotation tool, a pdf-conversion tool that makes them machine-readable, a capture tool, and a translation tool. Companion to Co:Writer.

Wordspeller SpellEZ Phonetic Dictionary – iOS, Android, Amazon.

Omoguru – app for smartphones and tablets that helps you make the text more readable and to decode letters and words easier. A set of tools helps improve reading rhythm, focus, and speed.

Read Aloud: A Text-to-Speech Voice Reader (Chrome Extension)

Speechify – reads text, paid version lets you scan any book and make it machine-readable

Natural Readers (free) – reads machine-readable texts in a pretty natural-sounding voice

Helperbird (Chrome Extension) – allows users to customize webpages to suit their preferences, makes Microsoft’s Immersive Reader available in the browser, integrates with Google Docs and Slides as well.

Immersive Reader (often built into Microsoft applications such as Word Online, OneNote Online, Teams, and the Edge browser). Immersive Reader Extension for Chrome

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This initiative aims to provide the UNE community with resources that inform and inspire action to support inclusive campuses and extended learning sites.

We embrace the idea that inclusion and creating a sense of belonging for all members of our community requires us to learn about and celebrate differences in backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. Learn more about this initiative and our mission.

Resources for Self-Care

It is important for all our UNE Community members to be familiar with the resources for support and self-care which are available to them on campus and in our local communities. Learn more about self-care resources.

Suggestions

The DEILRI is a crowdsourced community resource - we invite you to recommend resources for inclusion.

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This initiative aims to provide the UNE community with resources that inform and inspire action to support inclusive campuses and extended learning sites. We embrace the idea that inclusion and...

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Poor grades, especially in reading- and writing-intensive classes.

High risk of failing or dropping classes, being on probation, stopping out, or being dismissed.

Self-esteem, self-worth, mental health issues.

Stress, anger, anxiety, lack of motivation.

Fatigue from the burden of fighting everyday for access to a college education.

Poor sense of connection or belongingness to UNE communities.

Inadequate or damaged relationships with faculty and other sponsors and champions.

Opportunity costs for scholarships, mentorships, programs, research, and more.

HS dropout rates for students with learning disabilities are twice that of other students (National Center for Education Statistics).

"Youth with untreated dyslexia are more likely than their nondyslexic peers to drop out of high school and become unemployed, underemployed, or incarcerated" (Society for Neuroscience, Brain Research Success Stories).

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While students with dyslexia can apply for reasonable accommodations under the ADA and much of the support students with dyslexia need is available at UNE, there is no well-defined path for incoming students with dyslexia to find the other forms of support, technologies, information, and guidance they may need to overcome the routine obstacles they face to be successful students.

As a result, it can be a matter of happenstance if dyslexic students find the people, offices, technologies, and supports that facilitate their success.

Around the university, in-house best-practitioners are already providing some necessary support for students with dyslexia. Broadening and extending that support and ensuring that students find what they need easily is a matter of picking some low-hanging fruit, defining and improving pathways, removing routine obstacles, and ensuring that first-semester students find the path right away. Providing training and support for the faculty and staff who teach students with dyslexia is also necessary.

This is a problem that students with other learning disabilities and culturally-relocating students (such as first-generation students or second-language learners) also experience. Pathways and programming beyond accommodations and awareness should be built for them all.

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My student rated her effort reading this document 8/10 - "significantly effortful"

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As an essential part of UNE's governance structure, and since faculty have a considerable impact on student learning, UFA should be a motive force for this initiative and, in partnership with other units, guide its effort.

Work is already underway in some pockets of the University. We have some best-practitioners already in-house whose expertise and experience we can draw on.

In support of initiatives listed on the Ideas for... notes:

Consider charging the UFA Academic Affairs committee to:

Identify the obstacles facing teaching faculty and professional staff in their efforts to provide equitable access to course materials for students with dyslexia and with other learning disabilities or preferences and work with relevant UFA- and campus partners to overcome them.

Create and incentivize dyslexia-friendly policies with universal benefits for all students. Sample policy ideas:

Require all class materials (including but not limited to syllabi, course calendars, readings, handouts, and presentations) to be made available in a variety of accessible formats, including at least one format that is compatible with assistive technologies

Require that course calendars are up-to-date and assignments are published at least four weeks out to give students with dyslexia time to acquire accessible versions of non-accessible class materials.

Build on work already begun to operationalize UNE's Teaching Effectiveness Standard 1.3 "Teaching resources and practices demonstrate a commitment to inclusiveness, accessibility for all students and a student-centered approach."

Work with CeTL and other campus-partners, schools, colleges, and programs to incentivize, support, and extend ongoing faculty- development, scholarship of teaching and learning, and assessment of learning work to customize universal design for learning principles for local learning outcomes.

Permit students to use predictive-text assistive writing technologies designed for people with dyslexia, such as Co:Writer, Read & Write, and Real Writer and Reader.

Create awards and rewards for faculty and staff providing outstanding support for students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities or preferences.

Consider charging the UFA Academic Technologies Committee with the following initiatives:

Review the best available assistive technologies & resources for students with learning, maintaining and publishing that list.

Advocating for the resources to provide ready access to and training in assistive technologies for students, faculty, and professional staff.

Investigate how widely available the hardware and software necessary to produce ADA-compliant course materials are on UNE campuses and the cost and feasibility of making OCR tools like Adobe Acrobat Pro and OCR-ready scanners widely or at least strategically available.

Consider charging the UFA Faculty Affairs Committee with considering the following:

Make evidence of providing effective, equitable, inclusive access to learning spaces and materials an appropriately weighty factor in RPT for faculty.

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UNE SASC could hire a full-time Learning Technolgies specialist charged with creating and maintaining a list of learning technologies as well as offering support sessions and workshops to teach students, faculty, and staff how to use them.

UNE Admissions could market UNE as a dyslexia friendly environment and promote dyslexia pathway resources to prospective students

UNE Orientation could promote dyslexia pathway resources and host sessions for students and parents with questions and concerns.

UNE Libraries could curate a collection of books, articles, and resources about dyslexia and the experiences of people with dyslexia.

UNE CeTL could prioritize its existing professional development efforts related to Universal Design for Learning and Creating a Welcoming, Inclusive Learning Environment, including initiating projects in high-enrollment gateway courses and classes with higher DWF rates.

UNE Student Access could, with additional staffing, take on an advocacy and facilitation role for students with learning disabilities, and an educational role for faculty teaching them.

UNE Academic & Career Advising could designate one or two professional advisors to be "point persons" with specialized training and responsibilities for advising students with learning disabilties.

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A Reading Formatted to Be Read by Students with Dyslexia

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A Reading Formatted to Be Read by Students with Dyslexia

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My student rated this version of the article at 2/10 on an effort scale - "mildly effortful"

Click the white space to view. The online version of MS Word has a great version of Immersive Reader that lets the student further customize the look of the reading, focus on a few lines at a time, and to have the text read aloud to them. You should try it. Open the link, then find Immersive Reader under the VIEW menu. Play with the formatting features and give the read aloud function a try.

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Consider making UNE a dyslexia-friendly environment or a neurodiverse-friendly environment

Consider tasking a high-level committee including interested campus partners to learn more about UNE's other neurodiversities).

Consider tasking CeTL, UFA and College Academic Technology Committees, Student Access, SASC, Student Health & Counseling, and other units with exploring ways each unit might systematically support students with dyslexia and faculty and staff who teach and support them.

Consider investing in resources and personnel to support faculty and staff overcome the routine obstacles they face teaching students with dyslexia. Initiative might include:

improving UNE's knowledge of assistive technologies for students with dyslexia and systems of support for accessing and using them

providing financial assistance or dedicated computer labs to ensure that students with dyslexia have access to the assistive technologies that create a fair playing field for them.

ensuring that training to use assistive technologies is available to students with dyslexia and the faculty and staff that teach and support them.

Consider charging IT and relevant campus partners with ensuring that OCR and scanning technologies and software for creating ADA-compliant PDF/UA files are readily accessible to faculty, staff, and students.

IT might explore institutional licensing for the full version of Adobe Acrobat Pro on all faculty and staff computers as part of the standard software package, enabling them to make ADA-compliant documents.

If a more limited license is preferable, targeted units (including the Library, SASC, CeTL, Student Access, and Computer Labs open to students) might act as hubs for students, faculty and staff needing access.

Provide administrative support for faculty, staff, and students needing to create accessible files.

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Read the Fact Sheet for Anyone Teaching Dyslexia

Commit to making their classes, departments, and programs dyslexia-friendly environments.

Use the principles of Universal Design for Learning to ensure equitable access for all learners, including those with reading processing delays, low vision, multi-lingual learners, and others with perhaps undiagnosed needs. Guidelines for UDL based on the principles.

Routinely grant accommodations and extra time for reading and writing to students with dyslexia.

Look for signs that a student might have reading challenges and refer them to the Student Academic Success Center for reading support sessions.

Publish instructions and handouts in DOCX format, link to view-only files hosted on OneDrive instead of using PDFs.

Publish/provide all reading materials necessary to complete an assignment at least 4 weeks before the due date/

Ensure electronic textbooks and reading materials are available.

When choosing course materials, check to see if those materials are available in a variety of formats or through inclusive services such as Bookshare, the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, or UNE Library digital collections.

Ensure that any written material that you use in class can be read aloud by a computer. This includes prompts, study guides, slide decks, as well as readings. Unless pdfs are in PDF/US format, assume they are not machine readable (448). Creating Accessible Documents

Design documents you write yourself in ways that present less written material per page with no more than two directions in a sentence. Larger fonts, double spacing, wide margins, high contrast background colors, and bullets or numbers are also helpful.

Supply in class textual material the class period before using it in class

Refer students to reading support

Provide opportunities for dyslexic readers to talk through the material with you or a tutor on a one-on-one basis (449).

"Students with dyslexia need to engage in pre-task discussion before they can embark on a task independently" (Reid 2016).

Allow dyslexic students to prepare oral reports ahead of time rather than requiring instant oral responses in class (453).

Interpret phonological slips (It’s not the heat; it’s the humanity [for humidity]) as phonological slips, not as a lack of knowledge. Phonological slips are a result of confusing the sounds of language, so they should not be mistakenly interpreted as lack of knowledge (55, 453).

Grade written work on content rather than on form, especially spelling (453-54).

Permit students to use predictive-text assistive writing technologies designed for people with dyslexia, such as Co:Writer, Read & Write, and Real Writer and Reader.

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Embracing Dyslexia: The Interviews - Paul Vasquez

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Anticipating barriers to learning can go a long way to providing students with the learning conditions they need to succeed.

Keep in mind that, for students with dyslexia:

Decoding written language produces a lot of cognitive load for students with dyslexia. As a result, they may struggle to remember instructions, ideas, or materials given orally at the same time they are reading (Reid 2016)

For the same reason, the processing speed of students with dyslexia for higher order cognitive functions may be slower when involved in tasks that involve reading. They may have difficulty "handling time pressure, working quickly and efficiently, using efficient methods of learning, ... keeping on track, and keeping the purpose of the task in mind" (Reid 2016).

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Shaywitz, Sally and Jonathan Shaywitz, Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd ed., 2022.

Herbert, Michael, et. alia., “Why Children with Dyslexia Struggle with Writing and How to Help Them.” LSHSS 49 (Oct. 2018), 843-863.

Society for Neuroscience, Brain Research Success Stories

Newman, L. A., Madaus, J. W., Lalor, A. R., & Javitz, H. S. "Effect of accessing supports on higher education persistence of students with disabilities." Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 14(3), 353–363. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000170

Reid, Gavin. Dyslexia: A Practioner's Handbook, 2016.

Kirk, J. and Reid, G. (2003) Adult Dyslexia Checklist: Criteria and Considerations . BDA Handbook. Reading, British Dyslexia Association.

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Dyslexic Student Thrives at Boston College

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My Dyslexia Story: From Illiterate to University Lecturer

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Or send comments to edrown@une.edu.

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Dyslexia: A Beautiful Brain (2017). Dir. Virginia Orzel

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Dyslexia: A Beautiful Brain (2017). Dir. Virginia Orzel

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The Illustrated Guide to Dyslexia and Its Amazing People - Kate Power & Kathy Iwanczak Forsyth (2017)

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The Illustrated Guide to Dyslexia and Its Amazing People - Kate Power & Kathy Iwanczak Forsyth (2017)

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There have been some promising developments in UNE’s efforts to support students with dyslexia since my presentation to UFA in February:

Two committee chairs - Academic Affairs and Academic Technology - promised to consider those ideas and discuss them in committee. I'm looking forward to hearing their committee reports at this month's UFA meeting.

Librarian Sonya Durney has already acted on my suggestion that librarians curate a collection of dyslexia resources for students, faculty, and staff. She's gone beyond my request and initiated a conversation on the Library's Open Educational Resources committee to identify which databases and OER providers have the best accessibility tools.

Eric Drown has initiated a series of interviews with UNE students with dyslexia to document their experiences here. I’m hoping to extend the interview series to faculty and staff with dyslexia and other learning disabilities, as well as to document the challenges faced by professors who want to support students with dyslexia.

The CeTL Advisory Board recently voted to include Universal Design for Learning as a top-tier faculty development priority going forward.

Emily Watson, a SASC Tutor and the USG liaison to the UFA-Student Affairs committee has begun work (with Eric Drown's and Mark Sleiter's support) to assemble training materials to teach SASC peer tutors to better support students with dyslexia. Eric also gave her a few ideas on how USG and its committees could help.

Joanne Thompson, SASC Learning Specialist has started a 12-hour online course from Yale U. called “Overcoming Dyslexia” to increase SASC’s capacity to both support students with dyslexia and train our tutors with best practices.

Audrey Bartholomew, Education Chair and Coordinator of Special Education Programs, has reviewed my presentation materials and is coming to UFA-Student Affairs Committee for further discussion.

Amanda Benner, PT and Assistant Director of Clinical Education, has reached out to a contact at Landmark Outreach. Her contact suggested that UNE might be interested in having a cohort of faculty and student support professionals be trained in dyslexia support in the Landmark Outreach program. Along with Dr. Benner and the Landmark representative, Eric Drown & Mary Fraser of SASC, Diana Mayo of Student Access, and Marc Ebenfield of CeTL have agreed to participate.

Finally, two members of the Provost’s Office have been very supportive. Associate Provost for Student Success Colin Pears has offered strategic advice and a robust sounding board, and Assistant Provost for DEI Shannon Zlotkowski has reviewed my materials and offered to serve on a Task Force to work on this issue should one be launched.

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Providing high-quality learning opportunities in an equitable and inclusive learning environment lets faculty focus more on teaching the content they care about than on putting out fires.

Reduction of complaints.

Reduction of the need to engineer solutions on an ad hoc basis.

Have better relationships with students.

Reduce opportunity costs for students.