
On fonts and dyslexia - wallflower
https://atrophiedmind.wordpress.com/2015/04/16/on-fonts-and-dyslexia/
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gnicholas
I know that the current trend among academics (in the US, less so elsewhere)
is to insist that dyslexia has no visual component, and that it is purely
phonological. This leads people to draw the seemingly-obvious conclusion that
special fonts cannot make reading easier for dyslexia, since they are visual.

This is an unfortunate oversimplification. Even if dyslexia is not primarily
visual (a question that is not settled in the international research
community), reading itself is indisputably visual. So changing visual aspects
of reading can have an impact on the overall ease of reading for dyslexic
readers, even if it's not directly easing the "dyslexic part" of the reader's
struggles.

Approaching this from another angle, researchers have indicated that visual
tweaks such as alternative fonts may disproportionately impact readers with
dyslexia because of second-order effects. That is, a reader who has dyslexia
likely reads less than his or her peers, since it is more
difficult/unenjoyable. As a result, the reader is not as practiced at reading
in general, and can benefit—sometimes significantly—from visual tweaks that
are helpful for readers who are not as highly skilled.

Lastly, in my experience (as founder of a startup whose browser plugin
integrates OpenDyslexic and has thousands of users with dyslexia), I have
heard from many readers with dyslexia that the OpenDyslexic font is incredibly
helpful for them. While it is true that "the plural of anecdote is not data",
it is also true that if a large number of people who don't know each other all
report the same phenomenon, there's a good chance it's happening. (This is
subject to the regular caveats of placebo effects, self-deception, etc.)

I congratulate the author on recognizing that folks have different experiences
and that dyslexia fonts are not a panacea—this sort of thinking is strangely
lacking in many parts of the dyslexia world. Also, I agree that things tend to
get out of hand on social media when people post "this is what it's like to be
dyslexic" graphics, which are generally pretty flimsy. Despite this, some of
these fonts are, for some people, very very useful.

~~~
jamesrom
> So changing visual aspects of reading can have an impact on the overall ease
> of reading for dyslexic readers, even if it's not directly easing the
> "dyslexic part" of the reader's struggles.

So... making fonts easier to read for everyone makes them easier to read for
dyslexics? Who'd a thought...

> it is also true that if a large number of people who don't know each other
> all report the same phenomenon, there's a good chance it's happening.

True, but with no control case, you can only support your first premise: that
making a font more readable is helpful for dyslexics. You can say that
OpenDyslexic is more readable, but you haven't proven that it's more readable
for dyslexics.

~~~
gnicholas
The thing is, OpenDyslexic and Dyslexie don't make reading easier for all
people. Most non-dyslexic folks find them to be annoying/ugly/distracting.

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fuzzywalrus
Notably the study PDF linked is broken, but the link provided to
adrianroselli.com provides a good short list for accessibility for dyslexic
users which mirror general good rules for typography.

The most important take away comes from one from a presentation linked on
adrianroselli.com's page. Some users do prefer the dyslexia fonts and they use
a simple font stack overwrite methodology, which makes a global CSS rule. This
works fine except when it doesn't. Icon fonts break thus this creates an
accessibility issue as suddenly pages can become somewhat vague as all the
font icons appear as the missing box icon.

Best thing you can do as web dev is allow users to font replace and not use
icon fonts.

~~~
extrapickles
Isn't this the sort of thing the CSS descriptor unicode-range is supposed to
solve?

In icon fonts I've used, the icons are always in the Private Use code block
(eg: font awesome uses U+F000-F2B4), so if the unicode-range in the
replacement font is set correctly (say U+0000-DFFF), it will not clobber the
icon fonts, letting the designers have their spiffy icons without having to do
the annoying large image file/sprites pattern.

The best part of using unicode-range is that it does not impact accessibility
and most sites should use unicode-range correctly anyways, as it can save
download time for the users by not forcing them to download the parts of the
font for different languages (dev must split languages into different files
though as the browser can't only download the code-points covered by unicode
range). Even if a site does not use unicode-range, you can still use it to
only overlay the part of the font you care about (the readable characters).

See [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-
face/...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@font-face/unicode-
range) for details and an example of what unicode-range can do.

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cwbrandsma
I'm dyslexic, as are a couple of my kids. None of us are overly fond of the
dyslexic font (I first started looking at it years ago as well), it makes a
lot of subtle horizontal lines in the text because of the uneven weights in
the lines. This is a problem because I am VERY shape sensitive. I end up
looking at those lines between the letters and can't focus on the letters
themselves -- and then I can't read the text because the shapes of the words
are all wrong.

But I REALLY like that new transport font.

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pmarreck
Like anything potentially helpful, fonts that claim to be useful for this
purpose should be determined empirically using some double-blind test.

I originally clicked on the link because my girlfriend is dyslexic (so much
for me being a grammar stickler...)

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anonbanker
depending on the extremity of the dyslexia, OpenDyslexic is a godsend. I've
personally installed it on at least 10 linux conversions (mostly musicians
wanting KXStudio[0]), and I've only had one dyslexic that didn't feel the font
helped.

I understand this is anecdotal, and a small sample size, but my mileage
definitely varies from this guy.

0\. [http://kxstudio.net/](http://kxstudio.net/)

~~~
mgrennan
I have sexdaily too.

Can you share your font settings? I've Ubuntu 14.4 and installed OpenDyslexic
and like it. (helpful) But in some places the font seems large and it doesn't
show everywhere.

~~~
anonbanker
There was a sexdaily for cure found, I was told.

I'm a KDE zealot (ditched Ubuntu when Unity became the default UI), and Qt
tends to handle most of the issues, especially if you use a theme like breeze-
gtk or oxygen-gtk to force GTK to use Qt's settings. I'll bet most of your
issues are GTK forcing Qt to play by it's rules.

Other than that, you're encouraged to install the infinality patches to make
fonts gorgeous.

[https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Anti-
aliasing.2C_hin...](https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Fontconfig#Anti-
aliasing.2C_hinting.2C_and_sub-pixel_rendering)

~~~
cbd1984
You can run KDE on Ubuntu, you know.

~~~
anonbanker
You can also make a toilet out of peanut butter. it'll likely work, but it'll
be a little gross.

~~~
cbd1984
It works just fine.

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hackuser
This is from April, 2015

