I'm curious to know where you live. In the US—largely due to the impact of Dr. Shaywitz's work at Yale—the dominant thinking is that dyslexia is phonological, not visual. Yet in other parts of the world (including other English-speaking countries) researchers and the general public view dyslexia as something that can be visual or can be non-visual, depending on the person. One MIT professor estimated that roughly 1/3 are visual, 1/3 are non-visual, and 1/3 are a bit of both.
After talking with dozens of researchers, special ed teachers, and disability-rights advocates, I've learned that dyslexia is defined as a residual category. That is, someone is dyslexic if they don't read well, and it's not due to general lack of visual acuity or general lack of intelligence.
Considering that dyslexia is a residual category, it seems unlikely that the entire category would be caused by a single type of deficit. And in light of the fact that some (I have no idea what percentage) dyslexic readers say that their difficulty is visual in nature, this seems even less likely.
I became interested in this question because my startup, whose technology uses a visual trick to improve reading ability, became very popular in the dyslexic community. I was perplexed because much of the US-based literature proclaimed that dyslexia wasn't visual. In talking with folks in the US, I've seen a lot of cognitive dissonance because people find our (purely visual) tech to be very helpful for themselves or for their students, but it's been hammered into their head that dyslexia is not visual in nature. If that were 100% true, then one wouldn't expect a purely visual technology to be so helpful.
At the end of the day, we aren't completely sure why the tech helps dyslexic readers so much—we're just happy that people are using and benefiting from it. Sorry this reply got long and a bit off-topic; hopefully it's relevant to the larger conversation.
I'm in Belgium.
I have a feeling that the general public considers it to be something that affects reading ability and leave it at that.
However some of my language teachers (Dutch,English,French) would offer to print reading comprehension tests in a larger font, which does not help at all for me (nor any other dyslexic I know, but apparently some did find it helpful).
The speech therapists I saw after school for extra language lessons to help me with dyslexia seemed to have a lot better understanding. Or at least the never offered advice/help that I know didn't work for me, and I had noticeable improvements with those lessons.
You are correct that poor reading ability is the primary symptom of dyslexia, and that it had nothing to do with eye sight or intelligence.
Left me give you a brief run of what happens to me when reading the following sentence: "Reading this is impossible, but I try anyway." When I read it I may read "impobbible" instead. The thing is (for me) I saw the letters correctly. While reading that sentence and wrongly reading that I word I notice that something is wrong, so I stop to stare at the word and give it another attempt. At that point I see the word very clearly "impossible", but like a illiterate person I couldn't speak what was written down there (notice the phonological aspect?). The only option I have at that point is to look at each letter individually and then I usually get it "AH, It says 'impossible', of course!". I feel that the struggle I have here is really phonological in nature. After that I happily continue reading without to much issue until the next "strange" thing comes up.
So now my question is: Is this a "visual" problem? Did the letters "jump" around? Well... yes ... and ... no. They did. I read "impobbible". It really is what I thought was written down there. It feels like my brain says "yeah impossible means impobbible".
As an aside, if you asked me to write down the word that I had misread, with out letting me figure out what it truly was, then I probably wouldn't be able to remember what was written down there, and just go for whatever I pronounced. At least that is what I think would happen.
You don't look at each letter individually when reading, you match patterns of letters, parts of words, whole words, fill things in based on context... I feel like it is this pattern matching that goes completely wrong every now and then.
And that is where the visual aspect comes into play. Despite not being vision related I do find that using the opendyslexic font is a noticeable help, and I'm guessing its because it changes the shape of letter and words, which in turn changes how the pattern matching works. I feel that the claim that it is not a visual problem is very accurate but that certainly doesn't mean there can't be visual based tools to help us. Note that I also have dysgraphia, mgrennan mentioned that font was more of a help when you have both.
Interesting enough I hadn't noticed the incorrect spelling of the title of this post until
kator pointed it out in his comment. Anyway I hope this helps.
After talking with dozens of researchers, special ed teachers, and disability-rights advocates, I've learned that dyslexia is defined as a residual category. That is, someone is dyslexic if they don't read well, and it's not due to general lack of visual acuity or general lack of intelligence.
Considering that dyslexia is a residual category, it seems unlikely that the entire category would be caused by a single type of deficit. And in light of the fact that some (I have no idea what percentage) dyslexic readers say that their difficulty is visual in nature, this seems even less likely.
I became interested in this question because my startup, whose technology uses a visual trick to improve reading ability, became very popular in the dyslexic community. I was perplexed because much of the US-based literature proclaimed that dyslexia wasn't visual. In talking with folks in the US, I've seen a lot of cognitive dissonance because people find our (purely visual) tech to be very helpful for themselves or for their students, but it's been hammered into their head that dyslexia is not visual in nature. If that were 100% true, then one wouldn't expect a purely visual technology to be so helpful.
At the end of the day, we aren't completely sure why the tech helps dyslexic readers so much—we're just happy that people are using and benefiting from it. Sorry this reply got long and a bit off-topic; hopefully it's relevant to the larger conversation.