An Excellent Chrome Extension for Helping Students with Dyslexia

November is Clicks for a Cause Month! Check out how you can help a child in need below. 

According to the Mayo Clinic (2016), more than 3 million Americans are diagnosed with Dyslexia each year. Dyslexia can pose learning difficulties to students (and adults) with reading, writing, spelling, thinking and understanding. Chances are, you will or currently have a student with Dyslexia. How can you design a learning environment where ALL of your students can succeed?

Open-Dyslexic is an open source font designed to help increase readability for students (or adults) with Dyslexia. The free OpenDyslexic Chrome extension overrides all fonts on webpages with the OpenDyslexic font, and formats pages to be more easily readable. 

How does it work? 

Once you install the Chrome Extension, you can turn OpenDyslexic on/off by clicking on its icon in in the top-right corner of your browser. 

Here is what a typical Google Search result looks like: 

Here is what it looks like once you turn on OpenDyslexic: 

Why is this necessary? 

According to the Chrome Store:

• "Your brain can sometimes do funny things to letters. OpenDyslexic tries to help prevent some of these things from happening. Letters have heavy weighted bottoms to add a kind of "gravity" to each letter. You are able to quickly figure out which part of the letter is down because of this feature. It aids in recognizing the correct letter, and sometimes helps to keep your brain from rotating them around. Consistently weighted bottoms can also help reinforce the line of text. The unique shapes of each letter can help prevent confusion through flipping and swapping."

NOVEMBER IS CLICKS FOR A CAUSE MONTH! 

Addison Jacobs was born on 1/13/15, one month prematurely with unknown underlying medical issues. At nine months old, she was diagnosed with Shwachman-Diamond syndrome (SDS), a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, bone marrow dysfunction, leukemia predisposition, and skeletal abnormalities. Addison requires a lot of care with all of her complex medical issues. All of her medical necessities trips to Philly for her care and time off work creates an enormous financial strain on her family.  

During the month of November, I need your help to make a difference for Addison and her family! Here is how!

• Visit and share blog posts - I will be personally donating 1 cent to her family’s medical fund for every blog visit for the entire month of November. 

• Contribute to Addison’s GoFundMe page

• Show your support with a Like - ​  “Like” Addison’s Facebook page and share words of encouragement!

• The family needs gift cards! Please contact Matt for more information.

Clicks for a Cause has been helping children in need since 2013! For more information, check out my Clicks for a Cause Page!