[oib]

I'm in Belgium. I have a feeling that the general public considers it to be something that affects reading ability and leave it at that.

However some of my language teachers (Dutch,English,French) would offer to print reading comprehension tests in a larger font, which does not help at all for me (nor any other dyslexic I know, but apparently some did find it helpful).

The speech therapists I saw after school for extra language lessons to help me with dyslexia seemed to have a lot better understanding. Or at least the never offered advice/help that I know didn't work for me, and I had noticeable improvements with those lessons.

You are correct that poor reading ability is the primary symptom of dyslexia, and that it had nothing to do with eye sight or intelligence.

Left me give you a brief run of what happens to me when reading the following sentence: "Reading this is impossible, but I try anyway." When I read it I may read "impobbible" instead. The thing is (for me) I saw the letters correctly. While reading that sentence and wrongly reading that I word I notice that something is wrong, so I stop to stare at the word and give it another attempt. At that point I see the word very clearly "impossible", but like a illiterate person I couldn't speak what was written down there (notice the phonological aspect?). The only option I have at that point is to look at each letter individually and then I usually get it "AH, It says 'impossible', of course!". I feel that the struggle I have here is really phonological in nature. After that I happily continue reading without to much issue until the next "strange" thing comes up.

So now my question is: Is this a "visual" problem? Did the letters "jump" around? Well... yes ... and ... no. They did. I read "impobbible". It really is what I thought was written down there. It feels like my brain says "yeah impossible means impobbible". As an aside, if you asked me to write down the word that I had misread, with out letting me figure out what it truly was, then I probably wouldn't be able to remember what was written down there, and just go for whatever I pronounced. At least that is what I think would happen.

You don't look at each letter individually when reading, you match patterns of letters, parts of words, whole words, fill things in based on context... I feel like it is this pattern matching that goes completely wrong every now and then.

And that is where the visual aspect comes into play. Despite not being vision related I do find that using the opendyslexic font is a noticeable help, and I'm guessing its because it changes the shape of letter and words, which in turn changes how the pattern matching works. I feel that the claim that it is not a visual problem is very accurate but that certainly doesn't mean there can't be visual based tools to help us. Note that I also have dysgraphia, mgrennan mentioned that font was more of a help when you have both.

Interesting enough I hadn't noticed the incorrect spelling of the title of this post until kator pointed it out in his comment. Anyway I hope this helps.