Dyslexia is a common learning difficulty that can cause problems with reading, writing and spelling. It’s a specific learning difficulty, which means it causes problems with certain abilities used for learning, such as reading and writing. Unlike a learning disability, intelligence isn’t affected.

Signs of dyslexia can be difficult to recognize before your child enters school, but some early clues may indicate a problem. Once your child reaches school age, your child’s teacher may be the first to notice a problem. Severity varies, but the condition often becomes apparent as a child starts learning to read.

Before school

Signs that a young child may be at risk of dyslexia include:

• Late talking
• Learning new words slowly
• Problems forming words correctly, such as reversing sounds in words or confusing words that sound alike
• Problems remembering or naming letters, numbers and colors
• Difficulty learning nursery rhymes or playing rhyming games

School age

Once your child is in school, dyslexia signs and symptoms may become more apparent, including:

• Reading well below the expected level for age
• Problems processing and understanding what he or she hears
• Difficulty finding the right word or forming answers to questions
• Problems remembering the sequence of things
• Difficulty seeing (and occasionally hearing) similarities and differences in letters and words
• Inability to sound out the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word
• Difficulty spelling
• Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
• Avoiding activities that involve reading

Teens and adults

Dyslexia signs in teens and adults are similar to those in children. Some common dyslexia signs and symptoms in teens and adults include:

• Difficulty reading, including reading aloud
• Slow and labor-intensive reading and writing
• Problems spelling
• Avoiding activities that involve reading
• Mispronouncing names or words, or problems retrieving words
• Trouble understanding jokes or expressions that have a meaning not easily understood from the specific words (idioms), such as “piece of cake” meaning “easy”
• Spending an unusually long time completing tasks that involve reading or writing
• Difficulty summarizing a story
• Trouble learning a foreign language
• Difficulty memorizing
• Difficulty doing math problems

Peer was developed to meet the unique requirements of people with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, in school, at home or in the work place.

Peer does this by providing high quality text to speech and speech to text software. Users can upload, edit or create documents, in a private and secure workspace, that can be accessed on any device at any time. For a low monthly or yearly fee.

Our goal with Peer is to create a learning environment that meets the needs of people with learning disabilities by removing the stress and anxiety, for people with reading, writing and spelling difficulties. By building the users confidence with their learning abilities and enable them to work independently.

We are dedicated to supporting people with learning disabilities. Peer can support other people with reading, writing and spelling difficulties, such as dyspraxia/DCD, ADHD, dyscalculia and dysgraphia. For more information about the support we offer please contact info@peer.ie.

With documents the user creates, uploads or edits to Peer, the user can use text to speech to help them with any words they are having difficultly reading. Text to speech can help remove the stress out of reading allowing you to focus on the content that has been read. this will help you understand any content you need to know in a school or work setting.

The Text to speech also works with documents that you are editing or creating, helping you to identify any errors you have created with your spelling and grammar. When creating or editing documents, the user can also use speech to text to help them if they are having any difficultly spelling or writing.

The combination of both text to speech and speech to text, gives the user full comprehensive support, enabling the user to work independently while massively reducing the stress and anxiety caused by reading, writing and spelling.

In read mode simply click or press on any word your having difficulty reading and the text to speech will read the word for you.

For a sentence just double press or double click on any word and the sentence will be read for you.

For Continuous Reading, long press or long click on any word and Peer will continually read for you.

You can pause the text to speech at any time by pressing the pause button.

When in writing mode click anywhere you want to read and press the play button. Peer will read for you till you press the pause button.

If you get to a word that you can’t spell, press the mic button and say the word you would like Peer to spell. Alternatively you can press the mic button and continuously talk and peer will write for you.

This works great if your finding it really hard to spell a few words in a sentence or have a very difficult sentence to write.

Simply drag and drop any pdf, word or txt document into your home page and then press on the document to open it. Peer will then convert the document for you.

Or on the home page press the upload file button. The user can navigate to the file you wish to upload.