App to help dyslexic people read

It all started when the engineer decided to create a country-wide competition – The Super App Idea Competition - encouraging children to use their creativity to come up with an idea for a mobile app, a mobile app that he could develop and the profits from which the competition winners could share. That’s when he met Olivia, and learned more about her condition.

“1 in 10 children in the UK have some level of dyslexia and could benefit from such an app straightaway. While researching the subject of dyslexia, I was lucky to meet 12 year old Olivia Loder who is the Young Ambassador for the British Dyslexia Association. Listening to her story, I decided to name the app Olivia Reader”, the inventor said.

Often people with dyslexia see words move when reading, and this movement can make the words go in and out of focus, "float" on the page or drift up and down or sideways. The letters in the words may also move closer together or pull apart.

The app aims to help combat those issues for users reading text online.

Mr Gasparetto said: "I talked to the children and asked them what helps them with their dyslexia and what they told me helped me develop the app. It allows them to change the font size, or run a virtual 'ruler' down the page. It also allows them to change the color of the words or the background”.

"The app works really well for news sites or Wikipedia – it is designed for pages full of text. I did research and there is really nothing else like this for web pages”, he added.
Olivia Reader is a free app, currently available to download from the Google Chrome webstore and iTunes.

Adapted from: http://bit.ly/2utD3Kr

More info: http://www.oliviareader.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSfESLP5NbE