October is National Dyslexia Month: HBO to feature informative programming

[kestrell]

Kes: I don't know if the statistics have radically altered in recent years but, as I understand it, approximately half of the people who use quote special formats unquote such as those found on Bookshare.org have print disabilities, such as dyslexia, rather than visual impairments. The statistics are not trivial for, as this blog post mentions, about ten percent of all student-age children may be dyslexic, and it bears no relation to intelligence (for example, research suggests that Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein may have been dyslexic). It bothers me that I still hear so many people dismiss readers who use text-to-speech as "not *really* reading," because such an attitude not only is a sort of put-down, but completely overlooks all the active cognitive elements which the reader is still performing, such as use of symbolic thinking, active imagining, making connections with other books and personal experience, making hypotheses about what will happen next, visualizing characters and action; reading by listening is far from a passive act.
http://blog.bookshare.org/2012/10/02/understand-dyslexia-in-national-dyslexia-month/