Author: Matt

Founder of Dyslexia Life Hacks

Do not underestimate the power of routine

Post author By Matt
Post date November 30, 2020
No Comments on Do not underestimate the power of routine

Your friends may mock your quirky habits and your love of routine, however if you are anything like me with a very poor short-term memory, you will find these vital. If I did not have my car keys next my wallet in the same drawer I would likely go out without one or the other or both in the morning!

Remember, people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs wore the same clothes to free up their minds to innovating and running their companies. Why not use this hack to help yourself? Having places and homes for all your important items and a morning ritual goes a long way to not forgetting things as you leave the house. Like that one time I went to the gym forgot my underwear.

Technology Writing

Fancy fonts

OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie are fonts which are developed specifically for dyslexic people. OpenDyslexic is a good place to start as it is a free download and works with Microsoft Office and can be added to a Kindle. This give you an idea of whether using dyslexia friendly font helps you are not.

Dyslexie precedes OpenDyslexic as a dyslexia friendly font; however, you do need to pay to use this font – don’t let that put you off. It is a slightly different form to that of OpenDyslexic and integrates better with more devices. My recommendation would be to start with OpenDyslexic then review Dyslexie later and see if it better suits your needs.

This hack is using OpenDyslexic font.

Technology

Audiobooks

Audiobooks are a great gateway when reading is not your forte or if you are trying to improve your reading you can listen to what has been said as well as following along with the physical booking. There are thousands of titles out there to suit any taste and all the key fiction and non-fiction books are covered. I cannot recommend this enough as a way of consuming really enjoyable literature and learning new things.

Technology Writing

Emojis!

Post author By Matt
Post date November 30, 2020
No Comments on Emojis!

Yes, the good old emoji.

They’re not only a good way of illustrating your text messages without using words that may or may not be spelt right, they can also give you a good hint on whether you are using the right word. One example is putting “over hear” but meaning “over here”: if you end up with the ear emoji in your phone emoji suggestions you know you’ve put the wrong version of “here” in.

Writing

The pen is mightier than the sword

Post author By Matt
Post date November 29, 2020
No Comments on The pen is mightier than the sword

If you have less than ideal handwriting then this hack may be for you.

I discovered partway through my university course that using a Biro while making notes meant they were illegible even to me when I looked to them later after lecture. Buying a pen that suits your writing style, hand size and grip preferences can make a big difference to how legible your handwriting becomes and a nice consistent factor to enable you to hone your handwriting skills. My personal preference is a Parker Jotter with the added bonus that they clip nicely into the rings on a note pad.

Technology Writing

Google it!

Misspelling a word in any word processing programme can be frustrating when you cannot find the correct spelling. Spell checkers are getting better but sometimes it is useful to type the word into Google and see what it autocorrects it to. One of the advantages of doing this is that the search result will give you an indication that you are searching for the correct word.

One thing I tend to do if I am really struggling to get a word spelt is remembering a movie/song/phrase and googling that. For example, you cannot spell the word “rises” and you have tried several iterations but keep getting the wrong word, there is the 2012 Batman film called The Dark Knight Rises, so you type the title into Google with “rises” spelt incorrectly and Google will suggest the correction for the word. You can now be confident you are putting the correct word in your work and you got to Google Batman – what could possibly be better!

It works with book names, song lyrics, album titles – any popular sentence or phrase you can think of that uses the word you are trying to spell can be fired into Google and Google will auto correct the troublesome word.

Technology Writing

Unleash the Dragon! (Speech-to-text)

Post author By Matt
Post date November 29, 2020
5 Comments on Unleash the Dragon! (Speech-to-text)

Dragon Naturally Speaking is a speech-to-text software that allows you to dictate to a word processor. This entire website was initially written using Dragon. This is a very powerful way of getting rid of the block in terms of getting information out of your head onto the page. It will go thought an initial phase of learning your voice – I found talking to it like a Radio 4 presenter helps and you soon get used to saying “fullstop” at the end of each sentence.

As this software is not only designed for dyslexic people but for people who have quite severe learning difficulties or disabilities, it has extra features outside of the dictation element. For example, you can tell it to “mouse click” in various areas the screen and can completely control the computer.

Dragon is good for exploiting the Fast, Bad, Wrong hack on this website.

Technology Writing

Pump up Word’s inbuilt grammar and spell checker

Post author By Matt
Post date November 29, 2020
No Comments on Pump up Word’s inbuilt grammar and spell checker

The following article shows how to improve Microsoft Word and Outlook’s inbuild spelling and grammar checker:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-improve-writing-style-using-grammar-tools-office