I'm going to tell you a secret. It's something almost no one in my professional life knows. I'm dyslexic. Given that knowledge, my chosen career—writer—might seem odd. But while I was cursed with poor spelling skills, I’ve always been drawn to storytelling. The career-planning report that accompanied the aptitude test I took at 13 even tried to dissuade me from a “literary” career, but even back then I had enough bravado to overrule that piece of computer-generated advice.

Dyslexia, my constant companion, occupies a taboo place in my personal narrative. Like my breath, I often forget it’s there. Sometimes I delude myself into thinking I’ve outgrown it. When I told friends that I was writing this article, several advised me to back out of the contract. One didn’t even believe me when I told her I was dyslexic. How could I be a writer? They were concerned this assignment might be my last.

But I’ve never thought of myself as having a disability. Instead, I see it as a glitch, and one I've gotten good at masking. I've been able to hide my dyslexia for decades simply because I live in an age of technological wonders. Microsoft Word spell-checks most every syllable I write. When my dyslexic mind mangles a word so much that it's rendered un-spell-checkable, I'll deploy an arsenal of workarounds. I might reverse-engineer a word by typing an easy synonym into the thesaurus, or I might paste my best attempt into my browser bar and let the search engine offer the correct spelling as a suggested query.

Writer Lisa Shapiro, who has struggled with dyslexia her entire life, frequently researches and writes at the New York Public Library. One in 10 people has dyslexia, so when Shapiro is working in the library, she will often think 10 percent of the people in the room have some form of the disorder. Bryan Derballa

These "cheats" are ingrained in my writing process; I hardly notice doing them anymore. But something happened a few months ago to break me out of my familiar routines. I began writing with the help of an AI-powered browser plug-in so adept at correcting my linguistic missteps, it ended up sending me on a quest to discover what life might be like in a technologically enabled post-dyslexic world.

When I was really little, I tried to see words—the actual orthography—as pictures. For the word “dog,” I would think: There’s a circle then a line, then a circle, then a circle with a hook. Knowing the specific letters and decoding them wasn’t part of my process. Thinking in pictures was how reading worked, I thought.

My dyslexia was discovered in grade school, where I had the benefit and luck of attending a well-funded institution equipped to respond to my obvious signs of trouble. By the end of second grade, I was enrolled in an intensive summer school program for dyslexics. My class used a slide projector-like device known as a Controlled Reader. Even back then, it was a relic; when the teacher flipped it on, the stuffy room filled with the aroma of an electrical fire.

The Controlled Reader projected text onto a screen at the front of the class just like a regular slide projector, but with one difference. Light would shine only through a narrow horizontal slit, allowing only a single line of text to be illuminated at any one time. Each line of text would flip into view for a second or two, then get replaced with the next one. The teacher could crank up the speed of the machine using a dial, forcing the class to read at speeds up to 130 words per minute.

After each reel, we were given a test, and over the weeks, the speed would be increased. While I was missing out on normal kid stuff—my morning swim time, horseback riding at summer camp—something happened to me in that overheated classroom. Reading began to click. I eventually found myself in honors classes, though I did have to advocate for my placement when teachers assumed my difficulty reading meant I should be kept apart from the smart kids.

In grade school, Shapiro took an intensive summer course for dyslexics that used a slide projector-like device known as a Controlled Reader Bryan Derballa The training helped. "Reading began to click," she says. Bryan Derballa

I later attended NYU’s film school and set out to make a documentary about my dyslexia. My seventh-grade English teacher even gave me his old Controlled Reader machine so I could use it in the film, but I lost my nerve and never finished the movie. I feared I wasn’t established or successful enough, and I believed in the trope that a personal story about overcoming a reading disability needed to accompany an outsized achievement. Like my dyslexia, I keep that speed-reading machine, an artifact from childhood, hidden away in the back of a closet.