A Vail Valley educator is working with a French eyewear company to combat dyslexia
Sandra Burner is introducing current and former students to Lexilens, a new technology working to ‘cancel’ dyslexia
Lexilens/Courtesy Photo
For over two decades, Vail Valley educator Sandra Burner has been working to help neurodiverse students strengthen their executive skills and learn effectively.
Burner currently works full-time as the resource director at Vail Christian High School, running its student success center. She also tutors kids and adults through her business The Learning Center.
Since 1998, Burner has always worked with dyslexic learners. In 2023, she completed a graduate-level certificate in neurodiversity with a specialization in executive functions. Over the years, she’s seen not only how the understanding of the neurobiological learning disability has evolved, but also how technology and coping mechanisms have adapted to make learning easier for many of her students.
“Education is becoming more and more accessible to a dyslexic learner, and they’re able to realize their full potential far better than they used to,” Burner said.
Most recently, Burner was introduced to Lexilens by one of her students at Vail Christian. And after seeing the immense potential, she became an ambassador for the brand.
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Lexilens — which were developed by French med-tech company ABEYE — are eyewear that enables smoother reading for individuals with dyslexia. While the glasses are widely available in France — where Burner’s student discovered Lexilens — they are only available online in other countries. However, the company is currently on an “accelerated program to get full FDA approval in the U.S.,” she said.
While it’s been less than a year, Burner has helped 10 individuals obtain the glasses.
“I’ve had the glasses since October, and I’ve met with many people, both adults and children that have dyslexia, and have found great success with them,” she said. “I have never had so much hope for dyslexic readers in over three decades of being an educator.”
Understanding dyslexia
One of these people was Morgan Wyrick; a former student of Burner’s from when she was the principal at then-Eagle Valley Christian Academy.
Wyrick graduated from Eagle Valley High School in 2009. After graduating, Wyrick received her bachelor’s degree from Colorado State University and then went on to receive both a master’s in Spanish as well as a master’s in international law and human rights from the University of Alcalá in Spain.
With these degrees, she’s worked around the world in civil rights and social action, disaster and humanitarian relief, education and human rights. Currently, at 33 years old, Wyrick is working in New York City for the United Nations’ Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate.
Wyrick was diagnosed with dyslexia in elementary school, so for most of her life and the entirety of her career, Wyrick has developed effective coping mechanisms for her dyslexia. Still, she referred to Lexilens as a “game changer.”
According to the definition of dyslexia utilized by the Colorado Department of Education, the learning disability is “characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities.”
“What we’ve discovered through neuroscience is it has nothing to do with cognition or intelligence. It’s just the way the reading center of the brain is processing information,” Burner said.
It’s also fairly common: “One in every five students in every classroom in the world has dyslexia,” she added.
How this looks for everyone differs from person to person. However, Burner has an analogy that describes how it presents for many people.
“If you go into a classroom and a teacher is teaching and they write a whole bunch of things on the whiteboard, and then instead of erasing it really well and using the cleaner and getting a perfect whiteboard again, they just kind of sloppily erase it and then they write more information on top of it. That’s what the dyslexic sees,” Burner said.
For dyslexics, words can appear crowded on a page, because they may be seeing mirror images of the text, wavy lines or moving letters, Burner said.
Wyrick described how dyslexia presents for her as this: “If I’m reading, my eyes, particularly my left eye, will drop, and I’ll lose my place in what I’m doing. And I’ll have to start over. That gets pretty frustrating after a while.”
Another result of dyslexia for Wyrick is that auditory instructions will often get “jumbled” in her head and numbers are often mixed around.
Burner described dyslexia as “an added layer of difficulty for a student for learning.”
However, it sometimes is a “superpower,” she added.
“We’re finding in neuroscience research that dyslexics are extremely creative people, and they tend to be very strong in the STEAM fields,” Bruner said.
Taking off the parachute
Through her work tutoring and at Vail Christian, Burner uses several types of therapies — including multi-sensory instruction, assistive technology and more — to assist dyslexic learners.
Through her education and career, Wyrick developed several coping mechanisms. This includes using a ruler or envelope under whatever she’s reading to hold her place, using color coding to help with spelling certain words, repeating back her understanding of auditory instructions to ensure comprehension and more. In recent years, text-to-speech technology has become a significant tool.
“I did OK. I’m a bona-fide professional now,” Wyrick said.
For this reason, when Burner told her about the Lexilens glasses, she was hesitant to try them at first.
“Because I am an adult learner and I have learned these coping mechanisms, I was a little skeptical at first because it wasn’t to the point where (dyslexia) had inhibited my ability to gain employment or stop me from anything,” Wyrick said.
She described Dyslexia as “like running with a parachute on.”
“When I put the glasses on as I was reading, I realized that the parachute was taken off; I was able to run at full speed,” Wyrick said.
“I could get going at a speed that was a lot more fluent; my eyes weren’t dropping, and I wasn’t losing my place, and I wasn’t mixing up numbers. I don’t have to read things two to three times through. I was able to read things as it was written without the coping mechanisms,” Wyrick said.
Put another way, Wyrick described her first experience with Lexilens as she went from watching an old TV with a bunch of static to the static clearing and being able to see the picture clearly.
It’s how the Lexilens work. Lexilens are electronic eyewear that has an active filter designed to correct the images and make reading easier. They take the “crowding or noise” of dyslexia, and correct it, Burner said.
“So the student or the reader is now no longer seeing the superimposed letter or the reversed letter, the mirror image,” she said. “(Lexilens) always say it may or may not work for every single type of dyslexia, of which there are multiple types, but in my experience, just since October, it has been highly successful with the students and adults that have tried them.”
Burner said ABEYE is also currently in presales and production with a computer screen that uses the same Lexilens technology.
Of the benefits she’s seen with the glasses, Burner said that reading fluency — an increase in both speed and accuracy — and enhanced reading comprehension are among the most exciting.
“Sometimes with dyslexia, you’re working so hard to correctly read what you are reading that you don’t even understand what you read,” Bruner said. “What students and adults that are using the glasses are telling me is the thing they’re the most excited about is they can read something once and they actually understand it and can answer questions about it.”
These glasses will still not replace the coping mechanisms and therapies she’s teaching, but they offer a great complement to all the strategies, Burner added.
Wyrick said that she’d continue using many of her coping mechanisms alongside Lexilens because many of them have become second nature.
“This is just another tool there. And it’s a super helpful tool,” Wyrick said.
To learn more about Lexilens, visit Lexilens.com. To connect with Burner, you can email her at TLC.VailValley@gmail.com.
