Reimagining Dyslexia Support: Transforming Learning Through Virtual Reality

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — The moment happened in a charter school classroom. As classmates looked on, one student pushed back his chair, raised his fist, and proudly declared he was heading to reading intervention — where he gets to play virtual reality (VR) games — because he’s dyslexic. In that instant, Dr. Aurelia O’Neil ’25 saw something remarkable: a student who grew from feeling ashamed of his learning differences to embracing them.

“With dyslexia, you’re constantly misunderstood,” O’Neil said.

O’Neil, who recently graduated from Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi with a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction, also works in the university’s Digital Learning and Academic Innovations (DLAI) office as an instructional designer. For her doctoral dissertation, she explored how dyslexia specialists integrate technology into dyslexia interventions, examining the challenges they encountered and how they utilized technology alongside their curricula. It’s a topic that has touched O’Neil personally. O’Neil is dyslexic, her husband is dyslexic, and together they’re raising two dyslexic children. In South Texas, however, licensed dyslexia specialists are scarce. In the Coastal Bend, only two are available, and both have full waitlists.

“I asked myself, ‘Why aren’t we exploring virtual reality more intentionally?’” O’Neil said. “As educators, we’re aware that multisensory instruction supports students with dyslexia. Virtual reality is the only technology that truly engages our senses and allows us to manipulate them.”

O’Neil’s interest in virtual reality as a learning tool deepened after she came across a language learning prototype on LinkedIn. The application displayed three floating letters — C-A-T — that each played their phoneme sounds.

“When the user placed the bubble letters together, they popped, and a cat appeared,” O’Neil said. “I considered all of the multisensory layers in that learning activity: audio, visual, touch from haptic feedback, and kinesthetic — That’s when I had the epiphany that VR would be worth exploring for students with dyslexia.”

O’Neil asked Dr. Corinne Valadez ’93, ’95, Professor of Education, to serve as her dissertation chair.

“Aurelia said, ‘I have an idea for a study I would love to do with you,’” Valadez said. “She started telling me about this tethered headset. And I said, ‘Oh my God. How did we not start doing this before?’”

That headset used an open-source VR letter-recognition app from Slovenian company Kobi360. O’Neil, working with Valadez as well as research and teaching assistant Lawrence Izuagie ’27,

piloted a program with three dyslexic students at a local charter school. Over four weeks, each child participated in brief five-minute VR sessions, three times a week. During these gamified sessions, they matched 3D floating letters to their corresponding outlines from a bird’s-eye view. Selecting a letter triggered a haptic vibration and played its phoneme, reinforcing learning through multisensory input. Students reported improved letter recognition skills and, more importantly, greater confidence in themselves.

“The students wanted to practice more, they wanted the application to give them more of a challenge, and they wanted new high scores,” O’Neil said.

Post-study interviews also observed improvement in student self-efficacy.

Following their pilot study, O’Neil and her research team were curious as to how XR designers could improve their educational applications with students with dyslexia in mind. Those questions spurred a second study to explore how XR designers from around the globe develop applications for neurodivergent learners. Their research was invited for inclusion in the Frontiers in Virtual Reality journal and is currently under review.

In April, O’Neil’s research team presented their work at MeaningfulXR 2025, a conference hosted by Stanford University and held on the University of California-Davis campus. The team received impressive feedback from attendees.

“She’s standing there rubbing shoulders with people from Stanford and Ivy League schools,” Valadez said. “Not just holding her own, but leading.”

Many of the attendees had never heard of TAMU-CC, but by the time the session ended, they knew all about the Island University, and O’Neil is proud to have earned the university some well-deserved attention.

“We’re the only university that’s leading this kind of research in virtual reality,” O’Neil said. “That has caught their interest. Our Island is now on their radar.”

O’Neil’s path now leads to school districts and dyslexia centers across Texas. Her dissertation also surveyed eight licensed dyslexia specialists nationwide to identify barriers and support needs for technology integration.

“They are interested,” O’Neil said. “There’s just not much available and not enough professional development.”

To bridge the gap, O’Neil envisions rental networks for headsets in underserved communities, research-driven prototypes co-developed with dyslexia specialists and educational technology companies, and remote-therapy models that harness the multisensory features of virtual reality to students in remote areas.

Ultimately, O’Neil’s aspiration is to develop a comprehensive program that trains teachers for dyslexia-specialist certification, sustains ongoing educational technology research in the field of dyslexia, and designs a comprehensive dyslexia curriculum, using technology supplementation.

“We’re charting untested waters,” O’Neil said. “But if we can further support dyslexia specialists with quality technology applications, then we’re changing the narrative of what instruction can look like in dyslexia interventions.”