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As e-readers grow in popularity as convenient alternatives to traditional books, researchers at the Smithsonian have found that convenience may not be their only benefit. The team discovered that when e-readers are set up to display only a few words per line, some people with dyslexia can read more easily, quickly and with greater comprehension. Their findings are published in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal PLOS ONE.

The Brain Balance Achievement Center, a franchise that opened in Mequon last summer, offers a program that it contends can help children overcome attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, Tourette syndrome, autism and other disorders. The 12-week program - costing $6,000, plus roughly $125 to $500 in nutritional supplements - purportedly does this by addressing an imbalance between the right and left sides of the brain that it calls "functional disconnection syndrome." The program is based on the contention that ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders all result from this syndrome. "That functional disconnection syndrome basically states in the literature that the two sides of the brain are not communicating effectively together due to the fact that one side of the brain is actually maturing at a faster rate than the other side," said Jeremy Fritz, a chiropractor and co-owner of the franchise. The "literature" consists of one study of children with ADHD, co-authored by the program's founder, published in an obscure journal based in Tel Aviv, Israel. There are no studies in respected, peer-reviewed journals that contend ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders stem from the development of one side of the brain faster than the other. "None of the neuro research would even come close to suggesting that," said Mina Dulcan, a professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and the head of the child and adolescent psychiatry program at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

When Kristi Cardwell was found to have dyslexia back in the early 1970s, her parents told the second-grader to let her teachers know so they could make accommodations for the extra help she might need.

Dyslexia, as 14-year-old Kade Leachman sees it, isn't a disability, it's a gift. The Sacajawea Middle School eighth-grader is an aspiring filmmaker, whose first 10-minute video documentary, "The D-Factor," will have its premier tonight in a free showing at the Museum of the Rockies.

Imagine being almost 30 and not able to read or write. That’s what happened to Nelson Lauver, author of the memoir “Most Unlikely to Succeed, The Trials, Travels and Ultimate Triumphs of a ‘Throwaway’ Kid.” In 1969, Lauver was a fun-loving first-grader, curious about school and eager to learn. His enthusiasm came to a halt the following year when dyslexia — a broad term used to define reading and writing disabilities — went undiagnosed, not unusual in the educational system of that time.

Imagine the level of frustration a young child must feel when he or she is truly putting all their effort into comprehending what they are reading, yet is unable to grasp any of the information. When I was in fourth grade I felt this frustration. I was told by many of my teachers that I “wasn’t trying” or “didn’t care” about the work, which left me feeling trapped. I had no way of proving that I wasn’t lazy and without a diagnosis of some sort, I didn’t know what to do.

Anna Biegel knew since she was in kindergarten that something was wrong.“I remember crying as a little child because I couldn’t read some of what the other kids could, and I would get so frustrated with the sounds,” the Billings native said.Biegel went on to graduate with honors in piano performance from Montana State University Billings. While she was in college she finally was able to put a name to her problem: dyslexia.

My name is Kathy Thompson and my son Jeffrey is a great kid and an excellent athlete. You would think that he doesn’t have a care in the world, except to make the first string on his football or wrestling team, but that is far from the case. Since kindergarten, Jeffrey struggled to read.

There's something funny about learning that a successful CEO or politician received bad grades in school. We're amused to hear that Steve Jobs earned C's on his way to a 2.6 GPA in high school-- before creating the most profitable company on Earth. But what if stories like these say more about the quality of our schools than we think? Indeed, statistics show that schools in the United States may not be fostering the skills needed to succeed in life after high school. A shocking number of high school graduates require remediation when they get to college. In New York City - which, unlike most other districts, is tracking the data and attempting to do something about it - more than half of high school graduates aren't prepared for coursework in in community college. Naturally, cities and states (and the authors of the Common Core Standards) have begun adjusting their approach, shifting focus to higher level skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, and even creativity. It's time we took a similar approach to the education of students with learning differences and learning disabilities.

The day I finally got an Individualized Education Program (IEP), I was in my junior year of high school. Now, I understand that when people think of a student who has an IEP, they usually think of a young child in elementary school. Unfortunately, for me, that wasn’t the case. For many years, my family and I tried to figure out my diagnosis and get me an IEP, but this process took longer than anyone could have imagined. After many visits to the neuropsychologist, I was finally diagnosed with dyslexia, AD/HD and auditory processing disorder.

People with learning disabilities (LD) are at the top of every field—and literature is no exception. Many of our favorite authors have overcome the adversity of LD to write books that entertain and inspire us. If you want to find out more about writers with LD or if you just want to find a quality summer read for yourself or your child, check out these books.

Getting into, paying for, and navigating through college is rarely easy. For students who have been diagnosed with learning disabilities (LD), that struggle can take on even more dimensions. Learning-related issues such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) often lead to difficulties in traditional classrooms and on standardized tests; if scholarship applications look foremost at test scores and GPAs, it can mean that LD students lose out. Fortunately, there are resources and scholarships out there that can help.

Founded in 1948 as Recording for the Blind, Learning Ally serves more than 300,000 K-12, college and graduate students, veterans and lifelong learners – all of whom cannot read standard print due to blindness, visual impairment, dyslexia, or other learning disabilities. Learning Ally’s collection of more than 70,000 digitally recorded textbooks and literature titles – downloadable and accessible on mainstream as well as specialized assistive technology devices – is the largest of its kind in the world. More than 6,000 volunteers across the U.S. help to record and process the educational materials, which students rely on to achieve academic and professional success. 

Special educators need to look at what a child can do instead of what he/she cannot do. There needs to be more emphasis on building up and expanding the skills a child is good at. Too often people get locked into a label such as dyslexia, ADHD, or autism, and they cannot see beyond the label. Kids that get a label often have uneven skills. They may be talented in one area and have a real deficiency in another.

Accessibility — also referred to as inclusivity — is all about making the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad work for as wide a range of people as possible. That can include the very young, the very old, people brand new to computers and mobile devices, and also people with disabilities and special needs. With iOS, Apple has added features to specifically help those with visual impairments, including blindness, color blindness, and low vision, with auditory impairments including deafness in one or both ears, physical or motor skill impairments, including limited coordination or range of motion, and learning challenges, including autism and dyslexia. It also includes general features, like Siri and FaceTime which can provide significant value for the blind or the deaf. Many of these features can be found in Settings, all of them can be found on the iPhone and iPad.

He's part of a growing group of gamers with disabilities who are speaking out against accessibility issues in games and who run the whole gamut from big-budget AAA fare to tiny one-person indie productions. They're backed by charities, such as AbleGamers and SpecialEffect, plus dozens of passionate individuals doing their best to make the hobby more inclusive to everyone — disabled or not. There are signs that more developers are listening, too. Infinity Ward included a colorblind option and a special "N0M4D" control layout for disabled players in the latest Call of Duty. Indie survival adventure The Last Door has a dyslexia font and closed captions. The recently released MMO WildStar has, among other accessibility features, support for all three main types of colorblindness. Games are finally opening up to audiences that previously couldn't enjoy them, and everyone's gaining from the trend.

Increased awareness of learning challenges such as dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder, together with improved diagnosis and treatment, has helped millions of students improve their academic performance. But, as they enter their senior year of high school and begin the college admissions process, they face a whole new set of challenges. Now is the time to begin preparing to meet them.

SAN FRANCISCO — Even as audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books, the number of titles accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is minuscule.A new service being announced Thursday by the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco is trying to change that. The group has hired hundreds of people to scan thousands of books into its digital database — more than doubling the titles available to people who aren't able to read a hard copy.Brewster Kahle, the organization's founder, says the project will initially make 1 million books available to the visually impaired, using money from foundations, libraries, corporations and the government. He's hoping a subsequent book drive will add even more titles to the collection.