Two specific learning differences that are common, frequently undiagnosed in adults, and surrounded by more myth than almost anything else in this area.
The most useful thing to establish first: dyslexia is a language processing difference, not a visual one. Almost every popular misconception — and one entire commercial product category — follows from getting that wrong.
Dyslexia is a specific learning difficulty affecting accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. The core difficulty is with phonological processing — hearing, holding and manipulating the individual sounds in words, and mapping those sounds reliably onto letters.
That's why it shows up as effortful decoding, slow reading, unstable spelling, and difficulty with things that require holding sound sequences: learning names, remembering strings of instructions, retrieving a word you definitely know.
It is unrelated to intelligence. That isn't a kindness, it's the definition — the diagnosis specifically describes a reading difficulty out of keeping with a person's general ability. Which is precisely why so many bright adults reach their thirties undiagnosed: they compensated successfully, and compensating successfully is what hid it.
Seeing letters backwards. Reversing letters is a normal stage in early writing for most children and is not diagnostic of anything. Dyslexia is not a problem with how letters look.
Reading is not the only thing affected. Working memory, processing speed, sequencing and word retrieval are commonly involved, which is why an adult with dyslexia may find meetings, phone numbers and verbal instructions harder than the reading itself.
This gets its own section because it is sold commercially, it is widely believed, and it delays access to the things that do work.
The claim is that reading difficulty stems from "visual stress" correctable with coloured filters or tinted lenses. The evidence does not support it:
The reason to be firm about this rather than diplomatic: it isn't harmless. A child given a coloured overlay instead of structured reading instruction loses time that matters enormously, and the apparent early improvement — which is real, and is motivation — makes it look like the problem is being addressed.
If reading is uncomfortable, that does warrant an eye test. Uncorrected refractive error, convergence problems and dry eye are all real and all treatable. What the evidence doesn't support is filters as a treatment for dyslexia.
For children: structured, systematic phonics. Explicit, sequential teaching of letter-sound relationships, practised to fluency. It is unglamorous, it is the intervention with the actual evidence base, and it works better the earlier it starts.
For adults: assistive technology, and it has got genuinely good. This is where the largest practical gain now sits, and a lot of adults diagnosed late have never been told what's available:
Less discussed and frequently dismissed as clumsiness, which misses what it is.
Developmental coordination disorder is a difficulty with the planning and execution of coordinated movement, out of keeping with age and general ability, present from childhood and causing real functional difficulty. It isn't a lack of practice or effort — it's motor planning.
In adults it looks like:
That last point is the one worth carrying: much of the cost isn't the coordination itself, it's the constant low-level effort of doing manually what others do automatically. It's the same structure as the compensation in dyslexia. The same accounting is what makes autistic burnout intelligible — sustained compensation is not free, and the bill arrives as exhaustion and lost capacity rather than as a bad mood.
The useful adult interventions are occupational therapy, task-specific practice of the things that actually matter rather than general coordination exercises, and workplace adjustments — typing rather than handwriting, more time, written instructions.
Dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD, autism, dyscalculia and tic disorders co-occur far more often than chance. A single diagnosis is frequently an incomplete picture, and someone assessed for one may well have features of another.
The practical consequence: if a diagnosis explains some of your difficulties but conspicuously not others, that's worth saying at a review rather than assuming the label was wrong. Why so many adults were missed entirely covers the diagnostic-rule changes that contributed, and the pattern is different again in women and girls.
A fair question, and the honest answer is that it depends what you want from it.
Reasons it helps: formal assessment is usually required for workplace adjustments and exam accommodations; it gives access to funded support in some education and employment schemes; and — reported consistently as the biggest effect — it reframes decades of assuming you were lazy or careless.
Reasons to think first: adult assessment is often private and not cheap, waiting lists exist where it isn't, and unlike ADHD there is no medication for either condition — the value is in understanding and adjustments rather than treatment.
Many adults find that knowing, and adopting the assistive technology, delivers most of the benefit. That's a legitimate position rather than a half-measure.
Nothing Proco sells treats dyslexia or dyspraxia, and nothing does. These are differences in how the brain processes language and movement, not deficiencies to be corrected.
Two things we should say plainly about our own category:
Commercial "brain training" programmes sold for learning difficulties generally show improvement on the trained task and poor transfer to anything else — including reading. Getting better at a game is not getting better at reading.
And on supplements specifically: there is a genuine research literature on omega-3 and attention symptoms, which we've written up at its actual size — omega-3 and adult ADHD symptoms and what the research says about nutrition and attention. That literature is about attention. It is not evidence for anything about dyslexia or dyspraxia, and extending it across would be the same move as the coloured overlays: a plausible-sounding mechanism standing in for an outcome nobody demonstrated.
Start with the assistive technology today — text-to-speech costs nothing and is already on your devices, and it doesn't require a diagnosis or anyone's permission.
Then, if a formal assessment would unlock something concrete, a GP, an employer's occupational health service, or a university disability service are the usual routes. And if reading has become uncomfortable rather than always having been hard, get your eyes tested — for the ordinary reasons, not for a filter.
And if the exhaustion is the dominant symptom rather than the reading or the coordination, it is worth ruling out the ordinary medical causes too — the four blood tests to ask for covers the cheap ones.
This article is not medical advice and cannot diagnose a specific learning difficulty. Formal assessment is carried out by qualified professionals — typically an educational psychologist or specialist assessor for dyslexia, and an occupational therapist or paediatrician for developmental coordination disorder.
Source: A rose-tinted cure: the myth of coloured overlays and dyslexia · The effect of coloured overlays and lenses on reading: a systematic review of the literature