Like specifically designed to overcome the left/right or up/down perceptual difficulties encountered by dyslexics?
Anyone here dyslexic who was frustrated with the general reaction that you're broken, that you can be fixed, and you should just be made to deal with things the same way everyone does?
I have spoken to a few who were turned off of subjects they appreciated or loved, because the inability to enjoy doing them in the typical manner ruined it.
My girlfriend, and her father actually, both hated math in school, both think they're terrible at it. Yet if I quiz them in a verbal manner, they operate better than they implied they were able to. Seems to me the problem is the assumption that arabic numerals (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) are required to do math. That you have to perform operations in them, and if you have difficulties, you just suck at math.
What clicked for me though, I told her about this guy, Daniel Tammet, he describes how numbers appear in his head. The shapes and textures encode the values, and by manipulating those images, he can do incredible calculations with ease, or memorize pi to like 25k places.
The same way we remember the route we took when we walked down the street yesterday, he sees a string of shapes representing pi.
She immediately tells me, 4 is beige, feels like sandpaper, 1 is round and yellow, 2 is a red dot, 3 is orange, and that she loved roman numerals when she had a teacher who would write problems for her that way.
She said math was beautiful then, amazing, it made sense.
I started thinking about it, and how I look at numbers. Spent the entire night trying to find different ways to produce a set of numerals which were distinguishable from all the others even if reversed or flipped, only rotation can change the symbols into others.
Worked on that idea for a while, then decided to start all over from scratch after failing to find a way to encode information into the strokes used to write the symbol in an obvious and aesthetic manner.
Then I made this:
http://i341.photobucket.com/albums/o...ysnumerals.jpg
The relationships between the symbols can be shown to represent the basic mathematical operations between them, how certain operations mean to take this piece off and put it on the first pieces after rotating them, so on.
It can be demonstrated with your fingers too.
Thumb obscuring your index finger behind the nail to show a fingertip
Index finger horizontally
Rotate the finger vertically
Bend the finger 90 degrees
Place your other finger next to it with both straight vertically
Crook one over to the other with a right angle
Both fingers horizontal
Crook one over to the other
Form a square with your bent finger and thumb touching the other
Hold one finger vertically with index and middle crossing it horizontally.
I'm not sure why I can't find a universally readable example of a similar concept, it has to have been developed before, I'd think. Like the private languages of twins, baby speak, the hash marks people use to tally things, just codified.