Do dyslexia fonts work? (2022)
edutopia.org
edutopia.org
She finds it very challenging to read her school textbooks, which are provided online on her Chromebook with a bad screen. I bought her paper versions of the same books.
Then e-ink screen would provide the same benefits ie: contrast.
I was not able to extract the PDF from the online textbook. I think I had something that would have worked to just get the content, but I'd have had to stitch all the chapters back together, and if the page numbers didn't match the original book it would have been a hassle for my daughter.
I used my son's HP Chromebook for about a year as a third device, and the screen was indeed pretty bad for reading.
Tuning brightness, colors and bumping font sizes helped; but at the end of the day it's a very low DPI screen and intricate letter shapes are that more blurry at the sizes that were easier for me to read.
I have no trouble reading all day on a Surface Pro, for comparison.
The serifs are visual cue to lead the eyes onto the next letter or word.
Any computer monitor with a resolution less than 4k renders text with a much worse quality than printed paper. Smaller resolutions may be perfectly adequate for movies and games, but they are not good enough for reading long texts, e.g. books.
Something like a 27 inch or 32 inch 4k monitor is acceptable for reading text. It is still not quite as good as printed paper, but the price of better monitors increases very quickly. At such sizes a 5k monitor would be needed for good text rendering, but those are much more expensive.
You normally sit at a longer distance from a monitor than from a book, so the dot-per-inch resolution of the monitor should be configured so that a page of text should have greater dimensions on the screen than when printed. For instance, for my 27 inch 4k monitor I configure a 216 dots-per-inch value, which results in an on-screen size about 4/3 bigger than on paper, e.g. for an A4 page. I also do not use the default OS fonts, but I replace them with better fonts. Some bad graphic environments may provide no access or only a hidden access to configuring directly the DPI value of the monitor, which is the right way for scaling what is displayed, and they provide only settings that may result in low-quality text rendering, e.g. a multiplier for the size of the fonts or of the windows.
With a good monitor and with well-configured appearance settings in the OS, I prefer very much to read books on the computer display, instead from physical books.
When I was young, I thought it was so strange that they would slow people down like this. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized the way my brain flipped the "on" switch for reading was different from how most people read.
One of the things talked about in a lot of speed reading circles is subvocalization, and not doing it. I assume if you're taking in several lines at a time you're not reading to yourself in your head and just seeing the words and understand them. I've tried this, but find it difficult and feel like my comprehension goes down. It also takes a lot of effort to actively change how my brain handles processing text, so I get tired of it rather quickly.
My mom read to me a lot when I was really little, pointing at the words as she read them, and as she tells it, one day when I was 3 I just told her it was my turn and I read books to her. She figured maybe I'd memorized a couple favorites, but on our next trip to the library, she found out some switch had flipped in my head and I was now "a reader."
Neither of my parents had younger siblings or cousins around and I was their first, and apparently they didn't remember their own childhood reading learning very well, so, "Oh, I guess she reads now," was as far as they looked into it until my preschool teachers were very surprised when I started the next year.
I don't really have any explanation for it other than "when I see words, I know what they mean," so unfortunately I don't think it's particularly helpful or generalizable. Just a quirk I guess.
Basically allowing advanced typography could help so many people with visual problems.
for example, allow adjustment of:
- spacing between characters
- spacing between words
- spacing between lines (giant spaces might help you)
- sizes of margins/gutters (whitespace that defines column width/height)
- more character color and background choices (night mode helps me)
- your own fonts
When amazon stopped allowing download of kindle books, I couldn't convert to epub and my reading took a nosedive. I use the kindle app for reading now and it is very limited in adjustability which makes reading harder for me.
There are more and more cases where my personal experience seems to contradict with science. And I am not sure what to make of that.
The article says that participants in the studies preferred the traditional fonts over the dyslexia fonts. I would argue that this contradicts the thesis that they would be more comfortable to read. Moreover, the way I read the article, it wasn't just reading speed but accuracy that was tested as well.
> There are more and more cases where my personal experience seems to contradict with science. And I am not sure what to make of that.
I find that I often have to question my preconceptions when I encounter this issue. In other words, I have invested e.g. time, effort and thought into something which I thought works and it is difficult to not fall into a kind of sunken cost fallacy, i.e. my brain doesn't want me to believe it does not work, because I have invested effort into it.
It's possible that the test used does not generalize to other reading contexts and populations.
Kuster et al. (2018) — Dyslexie font does not improve reading performance Journal of Learning Disabilities.
International Dyslexia Association (IDA) — Dyslexia Basics & Reading Interventions https://dyslexiaida.org
At face value, the idea of a dyslexic font makes sense. Dyslexia was long (and incorrectly) framed as a problem of letter flipping and visual confusion, so the logic followed that heavier, more distinctive, or asymmetrical letterforms might reduce perceptual errors. But modern research paints a different picture. Studies have found that the Dyslexie font did not improve reading speed, accuracy, or comprehension compared to standard fonts (1), while broader research synthesised by the International Dyslexia Association makes clear that the primary challenges in dyslexia lie in phonological decoding and language processing, not simply confusing a b for a d [2]. Changing letter shapes alone doesn’t meaningfully address how the brain processes written language. That doesn’t make these fonts useless. Some individuals genuinely prefer them, and personal preference matters. They’ve also been valuable in prompting conversations about dyslexia, readability, and inclusive design, which is undeniably a good thing. But when dyslexic fonts are positioned in sales decks as a meaningful accessibility intervention, scepticism is warranted. If you’re serious about investing time and money in accessibility, the evidence consistently suggests that effort is far better spent on content clarity, spacing, layout, plain language, and overall usability than on a font that promises far more than it can deliver.
In short: an interesting conversation starter, but if someone’s selling it as a silver bullet, there’s a strong chance you’re being sold snake oil.
This makes no sense. A spectrum would involve everyone having the same problem to different degrees; anything that addressed that problem would consistently show an effect.
There is a fashion for calling everything a spectrum. Maybe "range" would be a better term for a linear progression.
That’s difficult to measure objectively. Many schools lack the specialists who can spot this, and when they do, Teachers try different adaptations that help kids, so you’re going to have varying results based on the adaptations the person understands.
I have something called APD (auditory processing disorder) which essentially means that the areas of my brain that listen to speech, especially higher pitched female speech aren’t fully developed — I had chronic ear infections and my heading was negatively impacted. I adapted well, although with undiagnosed ADHD. Others do not for a variety of reasons.
So something may help type 1 dyslexia, but not help type 2 or type 3 etc.
The say that spectrum is inaccurate and the fruit salad is a better name) analogy/description.
Like with fruit salad, you can serve it to a table of people and everyone will have fruit salad on their plate, but it will be randomly varied for all. Some will have a lot of one fruit and a few others. Some will have all but one and so on.
I learned the opposite, that the term spectrum is used when it is not same problem to different degrees. That's how the autism spectrum was explained to me, because the problem differs over the spectrum. In opposition to "level" or "gradient", which is intended to be something more linear over the same dimension.
I believe this redefinition of the term comes from how a "rainbow spectrum" is perceived, as different colors (and not as it is defined, as a linear degree of wavelength)
The autism spectrum, in specific, was unified from what had been listed as separate disorders. That was done because the view was reached that these disorders reflected different degrees of the same underlying problem.
No, precisely the opposite. They weren't different degrees of the same underlying problem, they were a few different combinations of symptoms from a few different symptom categories: social, communication, and repetitive behaviors.
Something being a spectrum is not just a matter of intensity on a single axis ("more or less autistic"). Imagine a graph of the visible light spectrum, wavelengths map to symptoms and their intensities map to symptom severities.
ASD is a spectrum because different individuals have different levels of impairment in each area.
Consider this: Why is ASD a spectrum disorder and social anxiety isn't? Surely you don't believe that anxiety only comes in a single level of severity.
I do have two friends who like it. Maybe it's subjective?
Either way, I'm very happy people put effort in developing reading aids like this.
https://www.brailleinstitute.org/freefont/
It does all that while still looking like a normal, attractive font too.
The more I hear about dyslexia the more it sounds like the result of not being taught to read properly rather than any kind of neurological issue.
As i see it the fundamental issue in dyslexia has to do with tokenization and embedding.
The dyslexic brain uses a embedding space that is not very fit for purpose.
Some stuff that is dissimilar get embedded close to each other and some things that should be far from each other gets embedded close to each other.
Downstream networks that try to use these embeddings has a hard time trying to counteract the bad embeddings. The final result is a dyslexic person.
OTOH while I was educated in music for a long time, I have some kind of problem reading music that disappears when it's projected on a big screen. Yes, I have corrected vision. If I had been smarter I would have just memorized everything I played, which is what I have to do now because projecting music isn't too practical ATM.
So while I think for some people it's intrinsic, I think you're onto something. Never actually considered it as a cause.
Much as many autistic children having meltdowns are often viewed as being "ill-behaved", or that their parents don't discipline them enough/correctly.
I always assumed the visual processing limitations were part of the issue with the reversal/transcription problem. A sort of neurological sequencing disorder swapping out the correct visual sense with a mistake. Xerox style. One that the dyslexic font wouldn't help with.
If that's apparently not dyslexia, or part of their spectrum, what is it if it is a processing disorder that remains into adulthood?
They come across rather dismissively when their own links, as far as I clicked at least, were less firm. I do appreciate that visual aids hawked to parents are not going to help for this issue either. I would like a name for the thing which is so importantly not Dislexia.
Dislexia is a difficulty learning to read. It is a symptom, not an underlying condition. There are different underlying conditions which lead to different processing issues, which in turn lead to dislexia. So you're almost always going to be wrong when you say "dislexia is..."
And why are you also misspelling it?
And why did you capitalize it within the quote (despite that being another misquote), even though you don't capitalize it within your own comment?
criticizing misspelling in a thread about people with language difficulties...
There is so much bullshit out there about how kids should be taught to read, and too many schools unfortunately still use wrong methods disproven by science.
What works is phonics, old, tried and true. If your school isn't teaching it, you need to do it yourself at home or your kids risk never being good readers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonics
English is my second language. I found writing and pronunciation disconnected and learned two separate languages.
Fast forward a few years and I've had my eyes checked and found that I have mild astigmatism (0.25 left and 0.5 right).
Now I have a font that I can still read without glasses (but mostly in bed and with slightly larger text).
Therefore, the only things that will "work" for all dyslexics are things that fundamentally make reading and writing easier for everyone and not just dyslexics. So something like a font can help in the same way some fonts are easier to read than others, but the idea of a "dyslexia font" is a little silly.
So, I'm a believer