July 26, 2012

Dyslexic boys sail off just to get a normal education

Filed under: Weird by Orangemaster @ 12:20 pm

Two brothers, Enrique (15) and Hugo (13), both said to be highly intelligent and very dyslexic, have been denied education for more than a year (two years for Enrique) because local schools are unable to provide them with a suitable, adapted education. However, they are required to go to school until the age of 18, and home schooling is forbidden in the Netherlands, so staying home is illegal, but no school will have them. According to television show EenVandaag, some 16,000 children (!) are not attending school because there’s no adapted education for them, something the government keeps cutting down on.

Their mom explains that they had to work hard to read as good as the rest of the class in secondary school, but they couldn’t take proper notes, even legible ones. However, they understand better than the rest everything they are being taught and are being held back because they are dyslexic.

Remember Laura Dekker, the sailor girl who was allowed to circumnavigate the globe for a year? Well, she was allowed adapted education from the World School, so the brothers are going to do the same thing to force the government to give them an education. They are going to pull a ‘Laura Dekker’: they’re going to sail for a year and do their homework. Oh, and they are totally going to hit up children rights’ groups abroad to plead their cause and point fingers at the Ministry of Education. Their dad is a sailor and will follow them around by boat as well as help with their homework.

(Link: www.eenvandaag.nl, Photo of a sailboat by the US Navy)

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May 3, 2011

Special font for dyslexics wins lucrative Dutch prize

Filed under: Design,General by Orangemaster @ 12:24 pm

(In Dutch, with enough English (Dunglish) info in the presentation)

Winner of the Future Minds Awards, presented on 28 April 2011, Christian Boer, graphic designer and dyslexic himself, has created a font that helps people with dislexia to be able to read better. He explains in the video that dyslexics see letters in 3D and not 2D, which gave him the idea to ‘ground’ letters with a shaded background. It really looks simple and you wonder why nobody thought of it before.

The real prize for me, is that it really works. Parents of dyslexic children have come to me in awe, because their child had been reading for over an hour, which never happened before. With the prize money (EUR 10,000) I intend to further develop the font. Some languages have different letters, such as the ß in German and accents in French, so I want to investigate that. Furthermore, I have always been working on a low budget, and with now I can work on a slightly bigger and faster scale.

(Link: depers.nl, blog.smart-urban-stage.com)

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