We’d venture a guess that not many librarians give a great deal of thought to fonts, even though a typeface is such an integral part of reading. On the other hand, a lot of librarians are concerned about making information accessible to everyone, and there are fonts that are specifically designed to make reading easier for people with dyslexia – reportedly about 5-10% of us. One of these fonts, OpenDyslexic, has been in the tech news lately primarily because it has no licensing fee and is free for anyone to use. That makes it very affordable for books and popular reading devices like e-readers and smartphones.
- First free digital font optimized for dyslexics arrives (DailyTech/Jason Mick) “Curiously some dyslexic individuals visual processing cortexes rotate images that look slender, making characters appear backwards or upside down. By making the bottom look ‘heavier’ the font reportedly reduces this kind of visual ‘bug’ in the brains of people with this disability. Mr. Gonzalez wasn’t the first to use this trick, he explained, but he was the first font designer to make an affordable version.”
- Typefaces for dyslexia (British Dyslexia Association New Technologies Committee) “Some dyslexic people have expressed strong feelings about typefaces, but there is no agreement apart from saying it should be sans serif. […] We asked dyslexia forum members. Only a few people responded. So it may not be a burning issue for most dyslexic people. It is likely that line length, line spacing and font size are just as important.”
- New free font available to help those with dyslexia (Medical Xpress/Bob Yirka) “Once it was suggested that using bottom-heavy fonts might help with dyslexia, font developers rushed to create their own versions, hoping to capitalize on licensing fees. Gonzalez decided a better approach would be to design a font from scratch, and then make it free to anyone that wants to use it. And, that’s exactly what he’s done. Gonzalez’ hope is that OpenDyslexic differs enough from other fonts on the market to prevent litigation efforts from removing it from the public domain.”
- OpenDyslexic font gains ground with help of Instapaper (BBC News/Leo Kelion) “However, the inclusion of the font in Instapaper last week is perhaps the clearest sign yet that it is going mainstream. The program – which allows users to save versions of webpages so that they can be read offline – has about two million registered accounts. The app’s developer Marco Arment said he had first looked for a dyslexia-optimised font two years ago, but had failed to find one until he discovered OpenDyslexic.”
Fonts fact:
If you’re curious about non-free fonts for dyslexics, take a look at Dyslexie ($69), Gill Dyslexic ($20), or Sylexiad (£56).
