Introducing Leksa đź“–
As a parent of a child with dyslexia, I felt helpless as my son struggled with homework every day. He would come home and get started on his homework after school, and his reading homework would be some kind of text on a photocopied piece of paper. Frequently, the teacher would have xeroxed a page out of some textbook, and my son would struggle both with reading this poorly copied piece of paper and keeping track of how far he had gotten in the text. He would spend so much energy reading the letters of each word that he couldn’t remember much more than that last word when he got to the end of a sentence. As a parent, it’s painful to watch your child struggle like this.
I’m an app developer, so it feels natural to turn to technology to try to solve issues like this. I decided to make an app to address some of these problems. So, I sat down and split the problem into smaller parts.
- The paper problem:
- Use OCR (text recognition) to import the text onto his iPad.
- Increase the text size, with wide spacing between lines.
- Use a dyslexia-friendly font.
- The “where was I?” problem:
- Always highlight the current word.
- Have a button to step through the text.
- Keep the active word centered on the screen.
- Remember the position between reading sessions to pick up where we left off.
- The “what did I just read?” problem:
- Make a button that reads the text out loud.
- Continue from the current word onwards.
- Read it all from the beginning.
- Re-read the current sentence.
So, once I had that list sorted out, I started coding, and the result was an iOS app called Leksa. I made it to help make reading easier for my dyslexic son, and that’s what it does.
If you think it might be helpful to you or someone you know, try it out on the App Store!