Mother’s homemade tool to help beat daughter’s dyslexia turns business idea

A MOTHER has turned a homemade device she designed to help her daughter cope with dyslexia into a business project that could offer the same assistance to thousands of children.

Sheila Byrne from Malahide, Co Dublin, began cutting up cereal boxes when her daughter Jenny showed signs of difficulty reading when she started school 15 years ago. But when she lost her job two years ago, she used her redundancy money and a start-up grant from Fingal Enterprise Board, and has now launched the Readassist. What looks like nothing more than a six-inch ruler gives people with dyslexia the chance to focus just on the line of text they are trying to read, which can be a difficulty for those with the condition that affects an estimated 80,000 Irish people.

“I used to cut up bits of cardboard in the same way so that Jenny could read down carefully through each line, as she was having problems jumping between lines and just seeing a blur on the page,” said Sheila.