#dyslexie

Dyslexie, designed by the Dutch, dyslexic, graphic designer Christian Boer in 2008. Features include heavier line thickness at the bottom of most characters; slight downward slant on the curvature of the letters; elongation or diminishment of stems on some letters such as 'h and 'n'; added space between letters.

Gill Dyslexic, also designed by Boer. It aims to reduce the symmetry between letters, making them easier to distinguish. Like Dyslexie, the base of each letter is heavier than most other fonts, helping to orient the letter correctly.

OpenDyslexic, created by American designer Abelardo Gonzalez and released as a free and open source font in 2011. Shares many of the same design elements as Dyslexie (which has led to some conflict with Boer), such as heavy-weighted bottoms, unique shapes to each letter to prevent reversing and swapping, and wider letter spacing.

Read Regular, designed by Natascha Frensch at the Royal College of Art in London. Each character is designed to stand on its own and work together with its previous or next character. Ascenders and descenders are longer than most fonts to ensure distinction. Spacing within the o, e, a and u is enhanced and the openings in e and g are kept from visually closing in.

Lexia Readable, designed by Keith Bates at K-Type. This font has been called "Comic Sans for adults." Much like the other fonts, Lexia features long ascenders and descenders combined with generous letter spacing and asymmetrical lowercase b and d to help distinguish letters.

Sylexiad, designed by Robert Hillier, a Senior Lecturer at Norwich University College of Arts, and based on his PhD dissertation conducted on the font. Sylexiad features long ascenders and descenders, light weight, uniform strokes, perpendicular design, and generous inter-word spacing.

Despite all the laudable effort spent on these designs, however, no independent research has found that any font significantly improves reading speed or comprehension for dyslexics. This 2013 study, for example, found that Helvetica, Courier, Arial, and Verdana were the best fonts for dyslexics, the same fonts of choice for many efficient readers. Specially-designed typefaces may not really matter. It appears that san serif fonts with generous spacing between letters and words are most efficient, whether you are dyslexic or not.

Still, I do find the fonts shown here to be rather readable.

View more Typography Tuesday posts.

“Dyslexic typefaces”

The creators of so-called “dyslexic typefaces” such as Dyslexie claim that they help dyslexic people read by, essentially, avoiding making glyphs that look too similar. Examples are 6 and 9. Flip ‘em around, they look the same, people mix ‘em up sometimes.

And while this can reduce reading errors for everybody, it will not affect dyslexia beyond that, because that’s not how dyslexia works.

It’s not “dyslexia” just because you misread a word or letter. It is, in fact, completely normal for people to sometimes mix up letters or words, especially when they’re first learning to read. Non-dyslexic children, or adults who were formerly illiterate, very commonly make the kind of mistakes these “dyslexic typefaces” claim to help solve.

But dyslexia isn’t a reading disorder. It’s a language disorder. Dyslexic people have trouble processing any form of language, whether it’s written, spoken, or signed. It doesn’t matter how clear or distinct it is.

(Dyslexia is not known to affect overall intelligence other than by disrupting language processing.)

There’s an old saying: “The name is not the thing named”. I think that sums up dyslexia pretty well. If you put a bunch of flowers in front of someone and ask them to pick the rose, a typical normal person will find it pretty quickly, while a typical dyslexic person will take a while to remember what “rose” refers to. They immediately recognize the flower itself, absolutely, but dyslexic people do not readily match a real-life thing with what it is called.

It’s not that a dyslexic person can’t tell the glyphs 6 and 9 apart because they look too similar, but rather, a dyslexic person has trouble processing which actual number is written as which glyph. If they see the glyph 6, they are just as likely to mistake it for 9, 4, 5, 2, 38, or any other number that might make sense in context. They are seeing the glyph 6 just fine. They just have trouble connecting the written glyph 6 to the actual concept of the number six.

Ergo these typefaces do nothing to help with dyslexia - there is no typeface that can, except by making it easier for everybody to read.

Hell, telling dyslexic people they’re mixing up the glyphs in their brains is probably making it harder for them by basically gaslighting them.

So in short

Most non-dyslexic people can’t understand how dyslexia works.

Many non-dyslexic people sometimes mix up a few letters or words when they read.

Non-dyslexic people have fooled themselves into thinking this completely normal reading quirk is dyslexia.

Non-dyslexic people pat themselves on the back for making typefaces that might help with these non-dyslexic reading errors, and fraudulently claiming they do something about actual dyslexia.