Dyslexia and Me: Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome/Irlen Syndrome Awareness Day?

A ribbon of my own design. The blue signifies dyslexia awareness while black and white are shades that I find especially difficult to look at. The coloured dots are my ‘pixel vision’

There are a number of events throughout the year raising awareness for dyslexia. The recent ‘guerilla’ campaign by Decoding Dyslexia to raise awareness through the tag #ShowMe1in5 through social media seems to have been pretty successful (there are still people sharing the links on Twitter a I write this blog). Also Dyslexia Advocacy Week has just passed where I shared a video per day featuring a variety of dyslexic people talking about their experiences and their progression and success. However, I want my blog to cover not only dyslexia, but also Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome aka Irlen Syndrome. Having searched on Google (as you do) I have been unable to find a specific day or week dedicated to raising awareness on this specific learning difficulty that has links to dyslexia. So for this reason, I have decided to set aside this weeks blog to discuss Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome in hope to raise awareness of what it is!

While 1 in 5 may have dyslexia, it has been suggested that 1 in 7 or as many as 1 in 6 of the population are affected by Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome. So here are some facts and issues linked to Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome to hopefully give you a better understanding of this specific learning difficulty.

Dyslexia and Me: Doing it for the Grown Ups (and women?)

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

In the last month or so, I have been becoming far more active within the online community trying to raise awareness of dyslexia. It’s something that I was passionate about before I was diagnosed myself. When I was growing up we had a couple of family friends who suffered with dyslexia. Both have gone on to do amazing things, but there was always a struggle in reaching their goals. I had a poster of Albert Einstein on my wall as a teenager amongst all my posters of metal bands. It said on it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, a quote which I still live by to this day. Before I knew I was dyslexic I already had a number of people I admired due to their achievements despite struggling through school and the academic life to get to where they were. They were people I knew personally as well as the usual list of famous dyslexics that you can find on Google, Wikipedia etc.