Below the cut you'll find my attempt at helping you out with writing a dyslexic character. Much of my information has been gathered from my experiences as a person with dyslexia who grew up with dyslexic parents as well as friends and classmates with varying levels of dyslexia. I've also supplemented my understanding with research from sites such as the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association among others.
What Is Dyslexia?
Let's get this out of the way first off the bat.
Dyslexia is a learning disorder that people are born with which affects our ability to process shapes - such as letters or words - as connected to spoken sounds. It's neurological, which means that our brains process information differently than people without the disorder. Because it's something that we're born with, it's a condition we learn to adapt to while we grow up, just like someone with a more obvious disorder such as hearing or vision impairment or a improperly developed limb, does.
There is a condition where a similar disorder occurs after birth due to some form of brain damage, be that due to physical trauma or a medical condition such as a disease or a stroke, but that is called Alexia or Acquired Dyslexia, also known colloquially as "word blindness", "text blindness" or "visual aphasia". The big difference between the two is that alexia is something that happens after the ability to read has been established, while dyslexia is developmental, meaning before the ability is established.
Dyslexia may or may not be accompanied by additional conditions of dyscalculia (difficulty learning arithmetic), dysgraphia (a related condition that involves specifically the ability to write or type and related hand-eye coordination), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), auditory processing disorder (difficulty processing heard sounds that is sometimes thought to be a cause for dyslexia), and/or aphasia (a condition characterized by difficulty with spoken words).
The next thing to remember is that there are degrees of how much the disability affects a given person. For some, written words appear as a confusing jumble no matter what you do. They hide, change order, switch letters, occasionally just look completely alien as if you've never seen them before. I call that high level dyslexia. For others, the symptoms only really appear when the person isn't focusing - for example, when they're distracted or tired. The rest of the time, as long as they're focusing on what they're reading, they can generally manage well enough to give the impression of not having the disability. I call that low level dyslexia. And, of course, there is a whole range between those two relative extremes where your character might fall.
What Isn't Dyslexia?
Almost as important as establishing what it is is establishing what it is not.
Dyslexia is not a sign of mental impairment. Many people with dyslexia have normal or even high levels of intelligence. They just have trouble with language, particularly reading.
It is not a sign of laziness or visual impairment. It's not that the dyslexic person isn't trying hard enough or can't see the letters properly, but that they cannot process what they're seeing the way someone without the disorder can.
It is important to remember that dyslexia is a condition that is thought to affect between five to ten percent of any given population - and those estimates may actually be low - which means out of any given group of twenty people, there's a good chance that one to two of them have some level of dyslexia. When you play your character as being mentally impaired due to having dyslexia, you're furthering the stigma that the two are directly related conditions and thus that people with dyslexia are mentally impaired. Please don't do that.
How Does Dyslexia Present Itself?
Contrary to popular belief, most of us don't mirror write - write words and/or letters backwards. Yes, some do, but most don't. It's pretty rare. A lot of people don't move letters around while reading either. We're way more likely to accidentally omit letters from words - typing "wth" when we actually mean "with" or "does" when we mean "doesn't" for examples - or accidentally adding or subtract whole words from sentences we're writing. Occasionally letters and/or words can get transposed without us realizing it as well.
We're generally not the world's best at sounding out words or rhyming - what we think goes together, might not have any basis in reality. Learning a foreign language can be difficult or, almost paradoxically, actually easier to learn than our native one if the character set is different - logographic character sets like Chinese or Japanese actually uses different pathways for understanding which could bypass the problem areas with some dyslexics.
Yes, we do tend to have spelling issues. Sometimes we can tell we're spelling it wrong and we try to fix it. Sometimes our brain decides a word that's spelled right is spelled wrong and we end up "fixing" it into a misspelled word. Sometimes we'll just type the wrong word and never see it, even when re-reading - and by wrong word, I don't necessarily mean a typo. It could be an entirely different word altogether. Grammar can also be a problem for us, because it involves many of the same pathways as reading the words.
We can have trouble memorizing things without a lot of effort. Our ability to manage time isn't always the best and we can be easily distracted, not to mention frustrated when we can't understand something that everyone else in the world seems to get easily. Reading can be exhausting, so some of us avoid it. However, with early intervention and a lot of positive reenforcement of reading through being read to from an early age and patience, we can still learn to love reading and writing even though it's harder for us.
How Do Dyslexics Cope?
It really depends on the level of the individual's dyslexia, but there are several ways for people to cope. For many, early and continued focus on reading and written spelling - as opposed to oral repetition drills - helps. For others, there are special fonts that help guide the eyes along the words that help. Using ereaders is showing positive effects over the written word. Sometimes color gradiants can help as well.
Some develop even more interesting coping skills. A neighbor and friend of mine growing up is a fairly high level dyslexic which, unfortunately, wasn't discovered he'd almost left elementry school - grades kindergarten through 6th year. Because of this, by the time he entered fifth grade, he was functionally illiterate, however he also had one of the highest grades in the school, consistently on A and B honor roll. This wasn't due to our school being a bad one, but because of his coping skills.
He would pay his little brother to take dictation for him to do essays and homework. He struggled with tests, but somehow managed. However, the most impressive coping skill that I know of was how he handled in class reading. When a book was assigned, he'd go to the library and find it in book on tape form - even ordering it from another branch if necessary - and would then completely memorize the entire book on tape so that whenever the class was reading along, he could pick his cues from the previous classmate and recite the next part from memory while pretending to read his book.
It was eventually discovered that he was doing this when my mom - working as a sub at the time - realized that what he was reciting wasn't quite matching what was on the page of the edition they were supposedly reading. After class that day, she had him read from a random page without any cues and realized he couldn't read. A talk with his mom and an appointment with a specialist later and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. Once his condition was discovered, he was able to get the help he needed to learn to read on his own and eventually graduated with one of the top GPAs in our high school. But the extent of what he went through to make sure no one found out about his disability should be evident in that story.
What Are Some Other Problems Dyslexics Have?
We sometimes have trouble expressing ourselves verbally as well as with the written word. Our thoughts don't always want to be neatly regimented to come out sounding like rationality. Having to read aloud can be panic inducing due to earlier teasing in life, which may also cause us to have lower self-esteem.
We don't always understand non-literal uses of words, struggling with idioms, jargon, or puns and jokes. If people find out we're dyslexic, we are sometimes treated as if we're mentally disabled, leading us to try harder to hide it. This hiding could take the form online of rereading before posting or using spell checkers or grammar checkers to cross check our own attempts to catch our mistakes before hitting send.
Typically, when we're online, we make extra effort for our writing to be as clear and error free as possible. Those horribly misspelled and typo ridden posts that are so bad they're basically uncomprehendable accompanied by someone crying they're dyslexic and you shouldn't call them out on the mess? Probably no more dyslexic than the people who try to claim Tourette's or autism for poor behavior online when they're called on it. It's a learning disorder, not an excuse. No, we won't always want to have every little typo pointed out, but most of the time a gentle correction of something particularily glaring won't be taken badly.
The most important thing to remember though is not every one is going to have the same symptoms and those symptoms might not even stay the same throughout the course of the day. For me, for example, when I start the day after a full night's rest, I can focus and maintain a reading speed that is - for me - fairly fast. It's not as fast as some people, but it works for me. My handwriting is fairly neat and when I'm typing I don't make too many mistakes. However, as the day goes on, my errors start increasing. I'm far more likely to hit the wrong key or not notice a typo or grammatical error. I love reading and writing, but eventually even I'll get too frustrated and have to stop. I've had times when I'll sit there staring at a basic word - like "what" for example - and be utterly convinced I don't know what it is or how to pronouce it. I know the word, I know I do, but it'll look completely wrong. I've been reading a book and I'll get over halfway through and then I'll hit a name I've been reading without any trouble and I'll spend the next twenty minutes trying to puzzle it out. I like to think I have a fairly extensive vocabulary, but there will be times that I'll be talking or writing and I'll reach for a word and my mind is just blank.
It's not something we can control or something that's stable. Something that causes trouble one day could be a relative breeze the next. When you're playing a dyslexic character, try to remember that they won't always make the same mistake consistantly. That sometimes they'll stare blankly at the board or a book when asked to read something, while others they'll get through it - albeit fairly slowly or with some stumbling. But when texting or online, you're going to see more autocorrect gone wrong errors because that little squiggle under the word gives us a pretty good sign that the word isn't spelt correctly. Also there are some pretty cool apps out there that can help with reading on electronic devices.
