A Special Font for People with Dyslexia: Does it Work and, if so, why?

Abstract

In 2008 Christian Boer, a Dutch artist, developed a special font ("Dyslexie") to facilitate reading in children and adults with dyslexia. The font has received a lot of media attention worldwide (e.g., TheGuardian.com, Slate.com, TheAtlantic.com, USA Today, and io9.com). Interestingly, there is barely any empirical evidence for the efficacy of Dyslexie. This study aims to examine if Dyslexie is indeed more effective than a commonly used sans serif font (Arial) and, if so, whether this can be explained by its relatively large spacing settings. Participants were 39 low-progress readers who were learning to read in English. They were asked to read four different texts in four different font conditions that were all matched on letter display size (i.e., x-height), but differed in the degree to which they were matched for spacing settings. Results showed that low-progress readers performed better (i.e., read 7% more words per minute) in Dyslexie font than in standardly spaced Arial font. However, when within-word spacing and between-word spacing of Arial font was matched to that of Dyslexie font, the difference in reading speed was no longer significant. We concluded that the efficacy of Dyslexie font is not because of its specially designed letter shapes, but because of its particular spacing settings. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Inter-letter spacing, inter-word spacing, and font with dyslexia-friendly features: testing text readability in people with and without dyslexia

“…This was an expected result since in this unusual spacing condition, it is difficult to segment sentences into words because the sizes of the (increased) inter-letter and the (default) inter-word spacing appeared similar. However, contrary to several studies (Bachmann, 2013;Marinus et al, 2016;Zorzi et al, 2012), but in line with other previous research (Damiano, Gena, & Venturini, 2019;Kuster et al, 2017), a general advantage in reading speed due to increased spacing, in both its components, was not found either in children with dyslexia or in typical readers. The difference between default and increased spacing employed in the present study was smaller than that used in the study by Zorzi et al (2012), where the authors, using exceptionally wider spacing, found a positive effect on fluency in Italian and French readers.…”

“…The repetition of the same text across the 8 conditions was avoided in order to prevent learning effects. Following the same procedure used by Marinus et al (2016) to combine texts and conditions, we generated two Latin square matrices, one for the texts (12345678,23456781,34567812,45678123,56781234,67812345,78123456,81234567) and a second one for the conditions (ADEHCBGF, BCFGDAHE, GFCBEHAD, HEDAFGBC, EBGDAFCH, FAHCBEDG, CHAFGDEB, DGBEHCFA). This resulted in 64 (8 × 8) different text and condition combinations, each one randomly assigned to a child.…”

“…Unfortunately, Bachmann's study did not provide any information on the relative contribution of letterform and spacing on the final effect. Marinus et al (2016) dissociated the effect of these two variables comparing the DF font Dyslexie with Arial Regular, and with a version of Arial having the same spacing as Dyslexie. Their results clearly showed that it is possible to obtain the same facilitatory effect obtained with Dyslexie on sentence reading, even when Arial has the same spacing as Dyslexie, and that a dedicated letterform is not necessary.…”

Impact of digital text variables on legibility for persons with dyslexia

“…That OpenDyslexic has no effect on legibility and readability was also reported by Zikl et al (2015). Marinus et al (2016) confirmed that the Dyslexie typeface does not provide a benefit when read by people with dyslexia compared with Arial.…”

An Orthographic Prediction Error as the basis for efficient Visual Word Recognition

“…A noise manipulation, rather than, e.g., a comparison of different fonts, was applied since noise levels can be easily manipulated and quantified (i.e., in terms of the number of displaced pixels). In contrast, a direct comparison of fonts is more difficult because the contrast of proportional vs. mono-spaced font is confounded with many other visual differences like total stimulus width (Hautala, Hyönä, & Aro, 2011;Marinus et al, 2016). In addition, the 0% noise stimuli allowed us to replicate our original behavioral finding.…”