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For someone with dyslexia, the sentence “The budget must be capped at $34,000,” could easily be read: “The dugbet muts cabbed be at $430,00.”
Dyslexia is a common learning disability that makes it difficult for one to accurately recognize, read and write words. Often, people with dyslexia also have a hard time with spelling, decoding and reading comprehension.
It can be challenging to deal with dyslexia in today's communication-driven workplace. As Girard Sagmiller, author of Dyslexia: My Life, explains in his book: “[B]eing dyslexic is like running a 100-meter track race. In my lane, I have hurdles, but no one else does…. I try running like the other classmates, because we have all had the same education on how to run. But then I hit the first hurdle and fall flat on my face…. Then, someone takes the time to show me how to run hurdles and, like an Olympic hurdler, I outrun the other classmates. The key, though, is that I have to do it differently, the way that works best for me.”
Sagmiller and thousands of others have been very successful in their work despite their struggles with dyslexia. If you have dyslexia, here are some strategies you can use to manage your disability at work.
Seek Out Helpful Tools
According to some research estimates, 10 percent of the population has dyslexia in some form. In the United States, that means more than 20 million people are affected. The marketplace has responded with a range of tools that can help you in your work.
IBM Research offers Web adaptation software that lets you customize your browser to help make information easier to read and access. “For example, you can magnify text, increase the spacing between letters and words, change the color of the text and the background, turn off animation and sharpen images,” according to Shon Saliga, director of IBM's Worldwide Accessibility Center in Austin, Texas, and himself dyslexic. And some Web sites, like ReadPlease, offer software that allows your computer to read Web pages to you.
Nonprofit organizations like Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic offer educational materials for people with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic maintains a library of 93,000 educational materials and textbooks on tape and CD in many subject areas.
Adapt Your Schedule
As dyslexia experts Diana Bartlett and Sylvia Moody note in their book Dyslexia in the Workplace, dyslexia tends to be worse when you're worn out or stressed. If your job involves a lot of complex paperwork, for example, try to take care of it first thing in the morning instead of late in the day when your brain is tired.
Slow down as well, and double or even triple-check your work whenever possible, advises 25-year-old Thad Woosley, an assistant account executive with Ketchum Public Relations in Chicago. Woosley was diagnosed with dyslexia a few years ago.
Tell Your Coworkers
It's best to be up front about your disability rather than hiding it, Woosley says.
“First, it opens the door to communication about the disability; some people think it's laziness, or they just don't know how it might play out in the workplace,” Woosley says. But he stresses that self-disclosure about your dyslexia also “lets your manager know about your disability before a screw-up, which will happen.”
Woosley speaks from experience. He once told his supervisor he had trouble copying numbers and reading them aloud.
“He kind of laughed at the time, but I remember the first time we were working on a project where I was reading him numbers from a sheet and screwed up,” Woosley says. “He just looked at me and said, ‘Wow, I think I just witnessed dyslexia for the first time.' Telling him up front made the situation easy to deal with -- although I was embarrassed. And I was surprised to see a look on his face like, ‘it does exist, it is real.'”
If you have dyslexia or think you might, check out the following resources to learn more about dealing with it on the job:
