Access to some special educational resources and funding is contingent upon having a diagnosis of dyslexia. As a result, when Staffordshire and Warwickshire proposed in 2018 to teach reading to all children with reading difficulties, using techniques proven to be successful for most children with a diagnosis of dyslexia, without first requiring the families to obtain an official diagnosis, dyslexia advocates and parents of children with dyslexia were fearful that they were losing a privileged status. Stigma and Success
The stigma surrounding dyslexia is just beginning to be understood.As awareness increases, it is informative to observe the long list of notable people who struggled with dyslexia but ended up with successful careers, among them Whoopi Goldberg, who said:

When I was a kid they didn’t call it dyslexia. They called it you know, you were slow, or you were retarded, or whatever. What you can never change is the effect that the words ‘dumb’ and ‘stupid’ have on young people. I knew I wasn’t stupid, and I knew I wasn’t dumb. Their success was not without struggle. Henry Winker said:

You want so badly to be able to do it and you cant. And no matter how hard you try, its not working...I would study my words. I would know them cold. I would know them backwards and forwards. I would go to class. I would pray that I had retained them. Then I would get the test and spend a lot of time thinking about where the hell those words went. I knew them.
The dual-route system could explain the different rates of dyslexia occurrence between different languages (e.g., the consistency of phonological rules in the Spanish language could account for the fact that Spanish-speaking children show a higher level of performance in non-word reading, when compared to English-speakers). Diagnosis
Dyslexia is a heterogeneous, dimensional learning disorder that impairs accurate and fluent word reading and spelling. Typical—but not universal—features include difficulties with phonological awareness; inefficient and often inaccurate processing of sounds in oral language (phonological processing); and verbal working memory deficits.Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder, subcategorized in diagnostic guides as a learning disorder with impairment in reading (ICD-11 prefixes "developmental" to "learning disorder"; DSM-5 uses "specific"). Dyslexia is not a problem with intelligence. Emotional problems often arise secondary to learning difficulties. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke describes dyslexia as "difficulty with phonological processing (the manipulation of sounds), spelling, and/or rapid visual-verbal responding".The British Dyslexia Association defines dyslexia as "a learning difficulty that primarily affects the skills involved in accurate and fluent word reading and spelling" and is characterized by "difficulties in phonological awareness, verbal memory and verbal processing speed". Phonological awareness enables one to identify, discriminate, remember (working memory), and mentally manipulate the sound structures of language—phonemes, onsite-rime segments, syllables, and words.