Photo: Scott Ballem
Teaching your kid to read can test even the most patient parent. When I think about how much time my husband, Scott, and I spent coaxing our now seven-year-old daughter Beatrice to look at the page and not into the air, to focus on the letters, to sound them out, I still feel terrible.
After a year of reading with little progress and tons of resistance, we came to a few realizations. She didn?t want to look at the page. She couldn?t focus on the letters. And there was no way she was going to sound them out.
That?s because Beatrice has dyslexia. We finally had her tested a few months ago at the start of this school year because we suspected there was something going on that we couldn?t quite crack. And we were right. The brain of a person with dyslexia simply works differently?the circuitry is unique. Words on a page don?t quite look the same for Beatrice as they do for me, and working through a word, let alone a whole block of text, might feel something like this.
This is what reading is like if you have dyslexia https://t.co/mXBTxUyxHZ pic.twitter.com/12HHYhMAl2
? CNN (@CNN) March 7, 2016

This website was created by Victor Widell, a computer developer who was inspired by a friend with dyslexia when she explained to him that while she can read, it takes a lot of concentration, and the letters seem to jump around. Widell created this site to mimic how that looks for people who don?t quite get it. Me included.
To be honest, I?ve struggled with Beatrice?s...