On fonts and dyslexia

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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/

This is from April, 2015