How to include people with Visual Impairments and Dyslexia

While Visual Impairments (VI) can be diagnosed quite young and can can come with a list of helpful things specific to the individual, dyslexia often isn’t recognised until much later and actually covers a lot more than just muddling letters. These tips should help make things a bit easier for children with VI, those learning to read and those with dyslexia and dyslexic type disorganisation/memory skills – bonus!

• Illustrate in a non-visual way
  Design your teaching to appeal to more than just eyes, read the Bible aloud, have objects, smells and foods to back up your teaching. And when you have pictures make them big, bright and bold!

• Give more time
  You may not have any longer with your group but you can make sure you’re not squeezing too much in. Often kids with VI or dyslexia will work harder to produce a smaller amount; Are there ways you can you judge their understanding verbally instead? But be aware that they might take a longer time to construct a verbal sentence, because without being able to read clearly things like sentance structure don’t get reinforced. In group situations, asking a question and asking everybody to think about it before answering can be a good way to allow equal imput into group discussions, as can asking for one word answers.

• Don’t get them to copy text
  Pre-printing or copying it our for them beforehand saves time and energy that can be spent on understanding. Colour coding is a great way to draw attention, ‘we’re going to look at verse 3, which is in red.’ But don’t expect anyone to be able to distinguish between similar colours.

• What’s the easiest to read?
  Sans-serif is easier to read than serifed fonts (serifs are the twiddly bits on the end of your letters). Italics and underlining make it harder to recognise letter shapes but putting things in bold, or making colour changes and using different font sizes are great ways to add emphasis. Often printing or viewing on a cream background is easier to see, red writing on black, dark blue on cream, and yellow on blue are often recommended as they minimise the letter jumping effect that dyslexics struggle with. Also left aligning your worksheets and powerpoints makes it easier to know where the next word is going to be. Centralising is fine for one heading but for subheadings bold is better

• Make it easy to remember
  Try and set things out the same way – pencils here, stickers there, sit in the same places. Make sure that those with VI can see you best. Learning memory verses with actions or to music will help much more than a written reminder of it. Don’t expect Dyslexics to remember their left and right. And always show, tell and repeat!

Hear are some helpful videos and websites:
Visualising Visual Impairments
A series on Visual Impairment Training from the NHS: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Helping teens to understand Visual Impairments