Are they accessible?

Anna D'Orazio remembers when her struggle with reading began.

She was in the first grade at a public school in Baltimore and friends with a group of kids who already had the skill locked down. One day they brought booklets with short stories to school to read together while sitting under trees on the playground.

When Anna opened her book she did not know what she was seeing. She couldn't recognize any of the words, except for the letter "a."

"I pretended I could read so I could fit in," she said. "But I really couldn't."

When Anna looks at a page of text, the words look distorted and all over the place. They can appear as one big clump, especially when the lines are close together.

"You can see a B and then your brain makes it like a D," she said.

At first, she did not know what it all meant.

"Am I ever going to be able to read? What does this mean? I'm not going to have a job when I grow up if I'm not able to read," she thought. "I remember the teacher was really mean to me because I couldn't read," she said, also recalling how some classmates made fun of her for failing a test.

Today, Anna is in the sixth grade and enrolled at the Promise School in Charleston where she is receiving specialized lessons.

The school, founded two years ago by her parents Brandie and Daniel D'Orazio, is just one of two in the Lowcountry area that focus on teaching students with dyslexia and other learning disabilities. Now in their second year, they have found their permanent home at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity on Race Street downtown after multiple relocations.

Dyslexia is a learning disability that impacts reading, spelling and pronouncing words due to differences in areas of the brain that process language. Small children can experience trouble learning rhymes and difficulty learning letters of the alphabet. For older kids, reading skills can be slowly acquired and mispronunciations common, causing these students to avoid reading aloud.