It can be difficult to read as quickly as non-dyslexic students and reading can be very tiring. If you are worried about keeping up with the reading for your course we suggest trying to see if the books on your reading lists can be found as audiobooks. There are details of where to find these, including audio text books on our audiobooks page.
A good trick for dyslexic English students is to listen to a book or story first, then to pick certain pages or the sections that most interest you in the physical book for close reading. Using audiobooks means you can get through books faster and they allow you to save your energy for the most important parts of the course.
In some cases you may not need to look at the physical copy of a book at all, be selective. Focus on the parts of the course where you really need to give your energy and that will most enable you to succeed. Not all lecturers will understand, some may be traditionalists, you do not have to tell them this is what you are doing.
Reading list books can be much easier for students studying courses related to English and Creative Writing to find as audiobooks. The classics normally taught on such courses are often turned into audiobooks and some will have many different audiobooks based on them.
If you decide to use audiobooks it is important to try and get the same unabridged version of the physical book if you can so you do not miss out on any important information for your course. If you want to switch between reading the physical copy and listening it also makes this much easier.
There is also text to speech software. Before you spend money on these solutions remember to check if you can get the cost covered by DSA (this is explained in our Students page). Find out more about text to speech in The Codpast’s A Beginners Guide to Text-Speech below.
Questia is a fantastic ebook subscription service for academic texts. The collection is extensive and wide ranging. You might be able to get the cost of subscribing to Questia covered by DSA if you mention it as something you think would help you in your needs assessment. Software that reads on screen text can be used with these ebooks. It is easier to use these sort of programs or apps with ebook because otherwise you need to manually scan each page from a physical book to your computer to use them.
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