See Right Dyslexia Glasses assembled these useful links as a resource for dyslexics without visual dyslexia. These links were chosen because they either offer free services or information about dyslexia that is presented in an objective manner.
This page is a work in progress with more links being added as I find them.
Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexic is offering a free 1 year membership for students (includeing home schooled) with documented print disabilities and learning disorders. This offer is only active until January 25 , 2010 but the membership will extend 1 year from date of application. What is new for RFB&D is that now their audio books etc can be downloaded to your computer and played or transfered to other media types and played .
I started to fill out a membership so I could report on what the usual membership cost. Towards the end of the application it was required to swear that you had a learning disability to continue. At that point I had to stop so I have no idea of what the cost will be to continue the membership after the free year.
This site provides 40 week by week instruction for teachers to teach reading to children at risk of dyslexia K-3 . It is designed for teachers and so the instructions are for small groups. I have looked at several of the activities and while I am not suggesting everyone homeschool their young dyslexics this would be a great resource for someone that does.
This program may be helpful for frustrated and motivated parents of dyslexic children that have trouble finding help and/or want to identify the specific areas where your child needs the most help so that help can be focused there.
As the name says it is free and is offered at no cost.
While Project Spectrum was created to give people with autism the opportunity to express their creativity and develop a life skill using Google SketchUp 3D modeling software, I thought dyslexics would like it also.
Note : I had to download the program twice. If you experience trouble downloading just try again.
There are currently 59 Children's Learning Centers in 15 states.They have helped thousands of dyslexic children receive free one-on-one multisensory reading and written language tutoring.
This link goes to their location page so you can quickly find out if they are in a location near you.
This is a new text correcting software program that is presently free to download because it is in its Beta form. It works very well and was made to correct the types of mistakes made by dyslexics. They will be comming out with a commercial version sometime in 2009 so the window for getting the download free is not very big. It presently only works with MS word. This link takes you to a page where you can type something and see how it will be corrected.
Read the Words is the text to speech product that I use on this site. It has a free level of service and is easy to use. I have a paid account at a higher level but the free level is very useful also. The avatar feature is also nice. There are several different ways of using the free service .
The Natural Reader is a free easy to use text to speech reader. There are upgraded versions that cost money. I downloaded and tried the free version and it works well.
I didn't try adding it to my tool bar instead I have been using the miniboard option . The program works by having you highlight the text that you want read and then clicking on the play arrow in the miniboard to read it. There seems to be a limit on how much text you can highlight and read at one time but I don't see that as a big problem unless you are making the text into a MP3 files to listen to later which I haven't tried yet.
Accessible Books and Periodicals for Readers with Print Disabilities
50,000 books available
Bookshare™ is free for all U.S. students with qualifying disabilities. Student memberships are currently funded by an award from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
This site allows you to download audio mp-3 files of books. I will be including similar sites below . Each has some of the same books and also ones that are unique to the site. You may want to browse each to see which ones are your best fit.
Much of my vocabulary was built from reading the words in context while I was reading for pleasure. As I read hundreds of pages a day growing up that worked for me. Since dyslexics in general read less , their chances of increasing their vocabulary from context is less. This site can help improve vocabulary by giving examples of words in a contextual manner. It is a different concept of learning vocabulary from learning definitions of a word and I suspect may be helpful for some dyslexics.
Almost all dyslexia educational interventions claim to help all dyslexics and claim to being research based. This site has evaluated all published studies on reading interventions and gives the results.
These are not studies made by the government but rather an analysis of all the published studies that meet certain criteria as to being well designed studies where the results would be expected to have scientific merit.
Because of the huge amount of information available you will need to help select the relevant categories. Some examples of your choices : beginning readers or adolescent readers , alphabetics,comprehension,fluency or general reading ability ( you can only pick one at a time) narrows down the type of problems and age of the study participants.
There is also a box to select studies that were done with poor readers or everyone and also different grade levels or ages.
A hypothetical search might be:all interventions, beginning readers, reading comprehension, of poor readers,in grades K-3 and a list will be provided of what studies have been done that meet the scientific criteria used of a dozen popular interventions.
The interventions are blue hyperlinks that will take you to a description of the basics of the interventions and the results of the studies . The results show average improvements in different categories and also the minimum and maximum improvements.
I suggest it is important to look at the average, minimum and maximum numbers to get an idea of how likely it is to benefit from the intervention. If all the numbers are about the same in a category it is likely that is about the gain anyone taking the intervention will have. Some results I looked at had negative or low results in some categories indicating that some who took the intervention had little benefit.
I have found it is very difficult to find this type of objective data for educational dyslexia interventions. If anyone finds the site too hard to use you can e-mail me at john@dyslexiaglasses.com and I will try to help you get the information you are looking for.
This might be a help for the dyslexic that is having difficulty writing an essay. The idea is basic but someone might find it helpful to be forced into the proper pattern.
This site has a a very good search engine to the site's information about dyslexia and learning disabilities. Use the search engine to find your information.
This is not a link exchange page to generate higher search engine rankings. I feel if you are here that you have had the chance to read about visual dyslexia. Good information about dyslexia and dyslexia interventions without another agenda is hard to find . I hope some find these links helpful. I will add more links as I find them.
1593 worksheets that can be downloaded for free by the American Dyslexia Association