Can a lamp remove the effects of dyslexia when reading? One company is claiming to have developed a lamp that has helped 90% of their customers living with the effects of dyslexia. With a cynical mind, John Hicks investigates the Lexilight.
NOTE- Apart from the manufacturer sending their product on loan to me, there has been no payment made for this review.
I really didn’t want to write this article!
I just know, that as soon as this article gets published, I will gain criticism for giving this product any kind of ‘airtime’ on my blog. When we talk about anything related to visual stress and dyslexia, the research is flaky. I have had parents and teachers talk about strategies for supporting dyslexia from an optical perspective whether they are referring to visual stress or dyslexia and this whole topic is a little like ‘Marmite’. Some people will emphatically swear as to the benefits of intervention from an optical perspective whilst others will refer to it as ‘selling snake-oil’. I am certainly in no position to judge as I don’t have any specialisms in that area.
When I heard about this lamp and the bold claim from French company, Lexilife, that this device could make a difference for 90% of ‘dyslexics’, I was as much intrigued as I was annoyed about the claim.
“According to tests conducted by our team, the Lexilight lamp works for almost 90% of dyslexics. It helps both children and adults with their reading disability.”
Annoyed?
Within my Parenting Dyslexia community, I know how desperate parents are to help their children and in some cases are willing to spend hundreds of pounds of their hard earned cash to help their children. Just having a diagnostic assessment privately can cost around £600 and often there is a pay wall for interventions that help with dyslexia. To claim that a product can help 90% of dyslexics is, in my view, irresponsible if you don’t have the research to back it up and in this case the research doesn’t back this up.
Lexilife’s claim is based upon research that French scientists have undertaken (see below) as well as the effectiveness of the Lexilight with most of their customers, having sold many hundreds of their product in France.
When asked about the research behind the technology they referred to research that was done by French scientists Guy Ropars and Albert le Floch who had discovered differences in the make up of the eye for people with and without dyslexia. The ‘symmetrical’ aspects within the eyes of dyslexic people can lend to a distorted view of text compared to that of non-dyslexic readers. The problem with the research, in my opinion, is that they used only 30 dyslexic and 30 non-dyslexic test subjects so the research data is not compelling because the sample group is not large enough. Find out more about the research here.
What I know about dyslexia is that there is no single cause for dyslexia as well as visual stress because each person who experiences it will do so for different reasons resulting in differing needs. Dyslexia is very much a spectrum based ‘condition’ where it can be mild through to severe.
So it is very much a risk for a company such as Lexilife to make the claims that they are making however their 20 years of research and investment would suggest that they are convinced of the benefits of their product, and it is for that reason alone I was intrigued and prepared to take a look and share my experiences reviewing the Lexilight.
Quick Summary
The Studying With Dyslexia Blog review summary of the Lexilight.
My Review.
Lexilife very kindly shipped out a Lexilight to me and when I received it I was impressed with the packaging. The lamp itself is exquisitely designed for a desk lamp. It is modern looking, sturdy and extremely practical if you were just looking for a desk lamp but I am not just looking for a desk lamp, I am looking for the lamp that matches the claims made by it’s manufacturer!
Setting up the lamp is easy. Firstly you turn it on using the front button and when that button is blue this is a standard desk lamp mode, when pressed again it turns green and this is the mode where the LED’s in the lamp pulse in a particular way that is expected to help someone with dyslexia to read more comfortably. The intensity of the light and the way it pulsates can be adjusted for preference using two control knobs situated behind the top part of the lamp..
I want to just give you the caveat that my review is extremely subjective and my testing non scientific, but I share this to give a perspective.
I am mildly dyslexic and I have a neurodiverse profile more akin to that of an ADHD profile, so I wasn’t expecting a difference for me, if I am honest.
The green means that the lamp is pulsating…
I wanted more than one opinion on the lamp and I knew that a close colleague of mine within ‘Dyslexia World’ had already had some time with a review copy, so I was keen to ask him about his experience.
I won’t mention this person’s name as they may well do their own review, but despite how severe his dyslexia is, he said that the lamp didn’t really have an effect on him. I have to admit I was disappointed to hear this but I needed to get some other perspectives.
Who else could I ask?
Well, in my household, I have my youngest daughter who is dyslexic and my oldest daughter has a diagnosis more similar to mine. My daughter’s boyfriend recently had a diagnosis of dyslexia too. So I let all three have a go with reading some text under the pulsating lamp…
Firstly, my daughter’s boyfriend had a go. I started by using the standard mode of the lamp as a baseline and he said that for him the text was distorted and difficult to read. He is currently an undergraduate and so I thought this could be interesting if he found a benefit. So I pressed the button to change the mode and then we made adjustments to the pulsation to make the reading experience as comfortable as possible.
I was absolutely ‘gobsmacked’, when my ‘test subject’ reported that the text all of a sudden looked so much better for him and that the text was comfortable to read! I truly wasn’t expecting this!
So I got my oldest daughter to try and for her it made no difference to her reading ability.
I got my youngest daughter to try and amazingly she also reported an improvement! That said, I switched it back to standard mode afterwards (without her knowing) and she said that it still helped. So that result wasn’t quite as good as first thought.
So some positive indications and then it was time for me to try.
In the cases of my daughters and related neuro-diverse boyfriends, they didn’t have a lot of time with the lamp so the results were limited and at best indicated that it could be useful for some.
I thought I would give the lamp a concerted effort and use it to read that ever growing pile of books that are useful to buy in the moment but never ever get read. I would attempt to give myself half an hour with the lamp in the mornings. So over the period of a week, I sat down at the start of the day and read from a book about neuro-diversity.
What did I personally experience?
I wasn’t expecting much if I am honest. I don’t have a diagnosis of visual stress and mostly I find that I get tired quickly from reading (I use reading to help get me to sleep at night, two pages in and I am sleeping like a baby!).
I fiddled with the settings to make the lamp light as comfortable to read as possible and I did experience a difference. Genuinely I have found that the lamp has made reading less tiresome for me. Usually I am yawning within seconds and I found that I could sit and read for about half an hour quite comfortably. I am still slow at processing what I am reading but I didn’t expect that to change. When I changed out of ‘pulsate’ mode to standard lamp mode, I found that the onset of fatigue rapidly took place.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Conclusions.
In conclusion, I personally don’t believe that this lamp is going to help 90% of dyslexic readers, I would like to see a change in the marketing as this claim is misleading. There could be any number of reasons why someone may purchase and keep this lamp because it is a beautiful product just as a lamp, the sheer sales performance just isn’t a reliable metric from a dyslexia research perspective and the scientific research that this technology relates to is more about visual stress than dyslexia itself and even then the research is not compelling.
There simply isn’t a ‘silver bullet ‘ for dyslexic readers that removes the challenges of reading. Everyone is going to respond to different strategies for coping to a greater or lesser extent..
That said, I can honestly say that I now know people who have tried this lamp and in some way have experienced a positive impact on their ability to read. With this information in mind as well as the video recommendations of users (despite the videos being in French), I can only conclude that this product MIGHT help dyslexic readers but they would need to try it first with the expectation that it might help.
The problem for the small company that makes this product is that for small companies innovation is a costly process and it results in the cost of the product being expensive for the customer. Lexilife sell this for about £500 which for me is too much for a lamp, but would I pay that if my child was severely dyslexic and this really did make a difference to them? Probably if I had the cash. If it didn’t have an effect then at least Lexilife allows it to be purchased and used for 100 days and will return it for a full refund should the lamp not make a difference.
I have tried to make this review as balanced as possible. I am less cynical about this product and I absolutely love a piece of tech that can help a person with dyslexia that is different to the usual technology that is available.
I would really like to hear from anyone in the UK who has found this lamp to make a huge difference to them or their child.
You won’t know if it does make a difference unless you try it, but Lexilife need to make it easy for you to try it and whilst restrictions are in place with the pandemic this could prove difficult because currently they only ship it from France and you won’t be visiting any exhibitions in the short term where you would be able to try it.
So what are your thoughts? Please leave a comment below or continue the conversation on Twitter.