Irlen Screening

After my daughter was diagnosed with Irlen Syndrome I did the training to become an Irlen Screener. This allows me to diagnose people with Irlen Syndrome, provide them with an appropriate colour overlay and refer them to a diagnostician to be tested for appropriate coloured glasses, if they need these. I also provide a report for educators so they can make appropriate adjustments and have an understanding of how irlen syndrome affects the student.

As studies have shown about 50% of people with reading difficulties have irlen syndrome, the diagnosis rate for assessments is quite high. An initial questionnaire can help establish if irlen syndrome is the likely diagnosis. Testing is helpful to discover the severity of the difficulty and the details of what the student’s experience is. It has been so interesting hearing people’s stories and parents are often surprised to find out the level of difficulties when a child is assessed.

I have had students who have thought they were just ‘dumb’ to read in a slow, choppy way, not realising that for other students the words don’t move, swirl, float off the page, change size, wash out, blur or merge into each other. The experience of each individual with irlen syndrome can be one or more of these symptoms and a variety of other symptoms. They often experience tiredness, headaches, nausea etc that sometimes is thought of as laziness, or just wanting to get out of work, when it doesn’t develop into a contagious illness.

The difference the overlays make can be quite astounding. For more mild students, the difference is more in the level of comfort in reading. For more severe students it can make a difference between struggling to read the title of a passage and being able to decode the entire passage, with occasional hesitations. It can be like night and day. Some students have both irlen and phonological dyslexia and others have gaps in their phonic knowledge due to the difficulty they have had. Once the irlen syndrome is adjusted for the student is able to make better use of the educational assistance they need to overcome their difficulties.