Many dyslexic students in higher education may look back at their experience in school with similar uncomfortable sentiments; puzzled looks from your teacher as you struggle to read out dense paragraphs in front of class, words on the page appearing jumbled no matter how many times you re-read them. And while dyslexia has been recognised for many years in education, many dyslexic people have felt that they didn’t get the support that they deserved in school, and so now the reading-list-induced uni anxiety is all too real.
That’s why we created Tailo, to offer a customised reading environment for neurodivergent people, including those with dyslexia. We aim to help students navigate reading challenges at uni in a way that’s seamless, tailored, and empowering.
So if you’re dyslexic yourself, or you’re assessing a dyslexic student and wondering how Tailo can help – you’ve come to the right place. Here’s our guide for making the most of Tailo as a dyslexic student.
What is Tailo?
Tailo is a web-based platform that transforms the way that neurodivergent students read and comprehend key knowledge, providing tailored support and tools to help them succeed. By using intelligent extraction technology, Tailo creates a neuroinclusive experience that supports the strengths of different minds, eliminating the cognitive stress of rigid PDFs and long Word documents.
How does Tailo help dyslexic students?
Transforms busy documents into a readable format
The most well-known challenge for dyslexic people is reading and comprehension. This is because dyslexic brains can struggle with phonemic awareness, i.e. decoding words. Letters like ‘d’ and ‘b’ can appear interchangeable on a page and so students can spend so much energy trying to decipher words that the comprehension is lost.
Tailo tackles this with custom extraction technology, which means it analyses a document and can pull out key content, images, tables, and diagrams in a way that is ordered and visually clear. You can also do things like highlight words you might not understand and Tailo will provide definitions in an accessible way.
Creates a customised reading environment
Dyslexic people often find that changing the background or font colour in a text makes it easier to read. Tailo offers a completely tailored and engaging visual display of documents, with text-to-speech to make it easier to process content, as well as the option to change background colours, fonts and spacing.
This means a consistent visual reading environment, which makes reading smoother, faster and less frustrating for dyslexic minds.
Helps to work out if a text is worth reading or not
Skim-reading a dense academic document is difficult at the best of times, but for dyslexic people this is a particular challenge. Tailo eliminates the stress of working out if a document is worth reading or not, providing overviews and content summaries and the option to input an advanced search for words or phrases to find the relevant sections of a document.
Where can I get access to Tailo?
Tailo is now available completely for free for students through the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA). The Disabled Students’ Allowance is a grant that helps with the costs of studying with a disability, providing access to things like one-to-one support, travel allowance, equipment and technology.
DSA is available for all UK students in higher education level 4 or above, with a diagnosis of a disability defined under the Equality Act of 2010.
You can apply for DSA using our guide, which includes an eligibility checker, and ask for Tailo in your needs assessment.