Hi, I'm Rossella Santapaola and I'm a Dyslexic designer.
I want to talk about how dyslexic people live. First of all, Dyslexia IS NOT a disease therefore I'm not here to find a cure but to help dyslexic people somehow. We do everything like other people, except reading. There are many things in the world that help dyslexic people, such as: computers, audiobooks, speech synthesis and so on. On the other hand, there’s nothing that help us reading paper books.

This is the way how a dyslexic person reads a book. It’s very difficult, in fact, sometimes while I’m reading a text, I skip lines. So, now I want to show you our design that we decide to call it: Readmark. Readmark helped me reading a book for my next exam. It’s useful especially when a text is written in the most hated font by dyslexic people: Times new roman. Readmark can’t change this font, however it can help dyslexic people to improve fluent reading.

Readmark in the appearance resemble to ruler or bookmark, hence take his name. This design is intended to make easier reading: it is mostly aimed at dyslexic people, because they often skip the lines, but anyone can use it. Readmark is made out of a flexible and lightweight plastic similarly a bookmark, that make it easier to use.

There are many book formats commercially available and for this reason there are more sizes of Readmark.

It can be 13 cm or 17 cm long and 3,5 (three point five) cm high.

Because it’s cheap, portable, flexible and there are more sizes and colors.

In the time of the technological revolution, not everyone can own a digital device with speech synthesis, moreover there are more paper books than ebook or audiobooks.

Everybody can own one or more Readmarks: it’s cheap, flexible, smart and portable, in fact, you can put it in a pocket or in a purse or you can put it in a book likewise a normal bookmark.

You can hook it at the page and scroll it with your hand while you are reading, moreover, you can see the last words of the previous line and the first words of the next line.

Thank you for watching!