Dyslexic captcha raises awareness of the disorder

India’s Jaslok Hospital is helping parents and teachers understand the struggles faced by children with the Decoding Dyslexia campaign’s captchas on popular websites.

With every tenth child suffering from dyslexia, India’s Jaslok Hospital wanted to remind parents and teachers that a pupil’s struggles in school could frequently be attributed to the disorder, rather than laziness or low intelligence. Working with the Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Lab, the hospital’s Decoding Dyslexia campaign turned the written work of dyslexic children into online captchas.

Not surprisingly, most adults were unable to correctly complete the dyslexic captchas, with ninety-five percent needing to press refresh to load a new one. The new captcha that loaded also included a message about the campaign with links to more information. More than one million people saw the campaign through the captchas, and online searches for dyslexia rose by 17 percent.

With so much change occurring worldwide, campaigns are looking for ways to use technology to help tell stories that close the empathy gap. A charity chatbot takes online visitors on a virtual journey to gather clean water, and a food donation campaign encouraged supporters to delete Instagram food photos in order to increase the number of meals distributed to local food banks. How could local governments adapt online story telling for use with technology-based civic engagement projects?