A friend who has dyslexia described to me how she experiences reading. She can read, but it takes a lot of concentration. Every word requires active effort to decode, almost like seeing it for the very first time. The letters do not literally fly around — but something subtler happens. Certain letters seem uncertain. A word that was just read correctly might look slightly different a moment later, and she has to check herself again.
Dyslexia is characterized by difficulty with learning to read fluently and with accurate comprehension despite normal or above-average intelligence. This includes difficulty with phonological awareness, phonological decoding, processing speed, orthographic coding, and auditory short-term memory. It is the most common learning disability and affects people across all backgrounds and languages. Around thirty to forty percent of people with dyslexia also experience some degree of visual disturbance while reading.
For some, certain letters blur into one another — particularly those that are mirror images, like b and d, or p and q. Text can appear to shimmer or flicker at the edges of focus. Words may seem to bunch together or gaps may appear where there should be none. Reading requires enormous concentration to keep each letter pinned to its correct form, and that concentration is exhausting to sustain over a long passage of text.
The experience is different for every person. Some describe it as though the page is slightly unstable — nothing dramatic, but enough to make reading feel like walking on slightly uneven ground. Others describe letters as being visually ambiguous, especially when reading quickly. The brain works harder than it should, just to do something most people take entirely for granted. Over time this leads to eye fatigue, headaches, and a deep reluctance to read at all.